Dugan lays the lire down on the bench with the other stuff. I look them over and check the dates, all back before I was born. A 1914, two 1930s, and two 1927s, one of which I got in may hand when Princess Grace asks me, "What's it say?" pointing to the slip of paper I'm also holding.

  "'Tenants 5A!'" it says, with an exclamation mark right after it, just like that, the pencil pressed down so hard it makes a scar on the paper. "'We have lived in this building for three years and have had no quarrel with anyone, but the situation up above us in your apartment has become unbearable to the people who have to live below you . . . which is us.

  "'We have spent many sleepless nights while you run through your apartment and move your furniture and other objects around.

  "'Also, when you flush your toilet, it makes a terrible noise in our apartment. At times you seem to use it seven or eight times in a row. I'm sure you are also annoyed with the sound of the flush. Can't you get the landlord to fix it? Are you not well? Can't you see a doctor?

  "'I am sure that you are not creating these annoyances intentionally, for spite or anything like that, since we don't even know you. We have had words one time and we hardly ever even lay eyes on you.

  "'I am writing this at 1 A.M. in the morning after you woke up both my wife and me from a sound sleep with your tramping around, rearranging furniture, and flushing the toilet.

  "'This has been going on for some time and it is in desperation that I am writing you.

  "'I would suggest that you use bedroom slippers late at night. Also that you complain to the landlord about the flush. Also that you should see a doctor if you are not feeling well.

  "'Please do not think that I am trying to run your private life. I am just annoyed and past the point of desperation.'"

  "Is it signed?" Dugan asks.

  "'Mr. Amico in Apartment 4A.'"

  "What's going on here?" this voice growls.

  It's O'Shea and Rourke, these two homicide dicks from the Monroe District, the Twelfth station house. The one what growled is O'Shea who always looks like he's got a bad case of indigestion and plays the bad cop. Rourke, who's got a very sweet face and disposition, plays the good cop but between the two, if I had to face it out or duke it out, I'd rather go up against O'Shea than Rourke any day of the week. There's something about the rage of a very quiet, easy-going man that can be very intimidating.

  "Up to your usual tricks, are you, Flannery?" O'Shea goes on. "Picking pockets, doing a little thievery?"

  I hand Rourke the note and stick my other hand with the lire in it into my pocket.

  Rourke grins and shakes his head like he's amused by a couple of pals who like to take the mickey out of one another, though he should know by now that O'Shea and me ain't buddies.

  "What are you doing here?" I ask.

  "You got a dead body, ain't you?"

  "We got a man what keeled over with a heart attack, is what we got. All we called for was an ambulance, not an investigation."

  "So, you're a doctor now, are you?" O'Shea says.

  I look at Rourke, hoping to get a straight answer.

  "Could you believe it, we got a slow day for once. Captain Pescaro sees us with our feet up for five minutes and has a fit. Asks us if that's all we got to do when your call come in. Next thing you know he tells us to come have a look, a thing like this. So, we'll have a look, keep Pescaro sweet."

  "What've you got in your hand?" O'Shea asks.

  "A note I took from the man's pocket."

  "What are you doing going through his pockets? First you're a doctor, now you're a coroner?"

  "What are you making a case out of here?" I say. "The man dies while he's exercising. Princess Grace and Shimmy Dugan here, the proprietors of this establishment—"

  "I know who is Princess Grace and Shimmy Dugan."

  "—naturally want to know who the man is so they can send a note of condolence or whatever to the wife or whoever after the police have informed the relatives or whenever."

  "They don't know who he is? The man comes here, jumps around in shorts and a sweat shirt, and they don't know the man's name?"

  "An oversight," Dugan says. "One of those little administrative details that slip through the cracks."

  O'Shea glares at him as though that's suspicious enough to call for thumb screws and twelve smacks with a wet towel.

  "Can I see that?" Rourke says very pleasantly, and I hand over the two pieces of paper.

  "What else you find in the poor bastard's pockets?" O'Shea demands.

  He holds out his hands and Dugan fills them with the money, the comb, and the used handkerchief, and I top the pile with the empty wallet.

  "There's some Italian money there," I say.

  "Italian money?" O'Shea says. "What would anybody be doing carrying around Italian money? There any place a person can spend Italian money in Chicago?"

  "He could've just got back from a trip to Italy," Princess Grace says.

  "Or somebody could've put it in his pocket."

  "Like who?"

  "Like I don't know."

  "You check the pockets in his suit coat?" Rourke asks.

  "No."

  "All right, then, let's do that."

  "The bunch of you can get the hell out of here," O'Shea says.

  Princess Grace pulls hisself up and strikes a pose, ready to tell O'Shea to go to hell or shove it or something, but Rourke's right there again, keeping the water smooth.

  "What difference does it make, Frank? Let them have a look. Maybe they can tell us something helpful."

  "Like what?" O'Shea asks.

  "Like I don't know, Frank, but it won't hurt to find out."

  FOUR

  While the rest of us watch, Rourke goes through the man's coat pockets. In the one on the right hand side there's a roll of Life Saver candies—Wint-O-Green—and the left one's empty. There's nothing in the handkerchief pocket. The right hand breast pocket's also empty but Rourke pulls something out of the left hand one.

  He fans out some photographs, then lays them out on a bench like he's dealing out a hand of cards.

  I take a look and get the same funny, kind of melancholy, feeling I always get when I look at old photos.

  The first one is of a man standing in front of a painted backdrop with three skinny little greyhounds at his feet. The man's leaning on a walking stick and has a short whip in his other hand. He looks a little bit like that French painter with the short legs—what with the beard and the kind of glasses what stay on because they're pinching his nose—who painted all them cancan dancers, except he's got regular legs and even looks like he was pretty tall. On the bottom is printed "Giovanni Guisti, Fotografo, Napoli, Via Cortina 30."

  The second photo is on thinner paper. The same man is standing in the middle of some ferns and reeds at the edge of a grove of trees. He's wearing a straw hat and he's also leaning on a walking stick.

  The third one is of a young woman with a nice figure, standing at the end of a little dock by a lake. Her face is in the shadow cast by this big hat she's wearing, but you can still see she's very pretty.

  The fourth and last photo is of the dog-lover in the beard standing in a garden with the young woman, with the statue of a Greek lady on pedestal just behind them over to the right.

  There's no printing or writing on the front of any of the last three pictures and no printing or writing on the backs of any of them except the one of the man in the straw hat by the woods. It was made up into a postcard like they used to do.

  "So, that wasn't much. Let's see what we got in here," O'Shea says and unzips the Leatherette briefcase.

  He takes out a handful of girlie magazines. Not the Penthouse and Playboy variety. These got titles like Torrid Zones and Hot Nites.

  I pick one up and leaf through it. There's a bunch of not very good black and whites of some women what the movies and television call bimbos. They're not outstandingly good-looking but some of them is well endowed. One color double-spread of the only really pretty girl in the magazine is in the middle. The staples are in the most unfortunate spots on her anatomy.

  She's dark-haired and what they call doe-eyed. Nothing hard about her, though the corners of her mouth look a little tight as though she's seen more than a girl with an innocent face like hers should've seen.

  "Getting your kicks, Flannery?" O'Shea says in a nasty way.

  I toss the magazine back on the pile.

  "You sure one of you ain't pocketed something?" O'Shea says, turning his attention to Princess Grace.

  "You thinking of doing a body search, you better warm your hands first, darling," Princess Grace says in his flutiest voice.

  "Ah, fachrissake," O'Shea says.

  "You go around talking about body searches, you better have reasonable cause," Dugan says. "Otherwise you could have an unlawful search charge on your hands."

  "And seizure," Princess Grace says. "Unlawful search and seizure."

  Rourke laughs and O'Shea turns red.

  "Well, Flannery?" he says to me.

  I'm very aware of the fact that I got that lire piece in my pocket but it's too late to hand it over after O'Shea accusing me of stealing from a dead man.

  "Well, what, O'Shea? If you want to search me, go ahead, but first it'd be nice if you'd tell me what the hell reason I'd have to lift the identity off somebody I was never even introduced to. All I ever saw of this poor guy was his backside jumping up and down and rolling around the floor. Besides which, if I was a thief, why didn't I pocket the cash?"

  "Because you heard us coming."

  "So, if I heard you coming and couldn't steal the money, when did I have the chance to steal anything else?"

  "You could've—"

  "Oh, for God's sake, Frank, give it a rest," Rourke says. "The next thing you know you'll be accusing Jimmy here of murdering the man."

  From the look on O'Shea's face I could see that he considered that something devoutly to be wished.

  FIVE

  I already announced that I'd be available to the precinct captains over to Brennan's in the back room on Saturday afternoons if they wanted a meeting, letting them know that I intend to keep a lot of the old venues and traditions.

  But I also decide that Monday nights, which was going to be my night to take care of any complaints or requests my precinct captains didn't think they could handle, is going to be held somewhere different.

  I mention this Sunday night at supper. There's me and my old man and Mary and Janet Canarias, who stops by practically every evening to see how Mary's doing and, a lot of times, stays to help make supper and sit down with us.

  When supper's over, Mike and Mary go into the living room to watch a little television because I said they should.

  Janet and me are doing the dishes, me washing and her drying.

  She congratulates me again for being the new Democratic Committeeman of the Twenty-seventh and says, "You said you were looking for a place to meet the people and I don't know if it would be the smartest thing in the world to ask the blacks and Hispanics—which, in case you didn't notice, you've got more of in your ward than anybody else—to walk into the back room of another white tavern like Brennan's to ask favors from an Anglo."

  "Thanks very much for the advice," I say, "but anybody with eyes in their head can see that."

  "I didn't mean to offend you, Jimmy," she says. "I just wanted to remind you because you've lived in your neighborhood all your life and your neighborhood's in a mainly white precinct in a mainly black ward."

  "I'm not taking offense, Janet. I appreciate you're taking the time to talk to me about what I got to watch out for with this new job. I'm just saying I know the Twenty-seventh was one of the old plantation wards from way back, with blacks living in it and even representing it sometimes, but whites like Chips Delvin, who lived in other neighborhoods, running it," I say.

  "Chips Delvin," she says, like she don't want to say any more about what she thinks about him for my sake. "Oh, I know the papers call him a 'sewer boss' and claim he runs the department and hands out thousands of patronage jobs—before the courts put the kibosh on most of that—without knowing anything about sewers except how to lift a manhole cover and see if everything's moving along, but I got to tell you, Janet, there's a lot of people, black and white and in between, who think the world of him."

  "I won't argue the point," she says. "Now that he's handed over the ward to you, do you think he'll be handing over the sewer department, too?"

  "He hasn't got that kind of power anymore. Maybe he never did," I say.

  "Even so, his recommendation might count for something."

  "It might."

  "What is it, Jimmy?"

  Three, maybe four, people in my life could read me like a book. My mother—God rest her soul—my wife Mary, and Janet Canarias, who started out being kind of a political pain in the neck but ended up being Mary's best friend and a very good friend to me. Also my old man, Mike Flannery, who can almost always tell when things ain't sitting right with me. But it's the women who seem to know something's troubling me almost before I know that something's troubling me. Also, sometimes, Mary's mother Charlotte.

  "Something's bothering you," she says.

  "I don't know if I want to be the head of the sewer department," I say. "I ain't got the knowledge. I ain't got the education."

  "You've walked every foot of those sewers."

  That makes me smile though it ain't really very funny walking them miles of scary pipes. "Well, I got to admit I done that," I say.

  "It's mostly meetings and paper work," she says. "You've got all sorts of engineers and specialists and superintendents actually running it for you. Your job would be mostly dealing with people and you've got to admit yourself, you're very good at that."

  "I guess I am, but shoving paper around and sitting on my duff listening to people yammer about ways and means, instead of getting out there and doing what's got to get done, could turn me into a stone. I'm used to being out on the streets, moving around, going here and there, up and down, you know what I mean?"

  "Well, yes, here and there, up and down," she says. "I can understand that."

  She's talking to me very seriously, but there's this little smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, which I understand. People try to talk serious about sewers and sewerage and serious matters like that, but they can't help it, they think there's something funny about it. I can understand that, even though they wouldn't think it was so funny if their toilets didn't flush or if the system backed up into their living room.

  "Anyway, that's not something I got to think about at the minute," I say. "What I got to think about is getting a place where the people can come talk to me if they want to."

  "When are you going to have your weekly open house?" she asks.

  "Well, I thought Mondays."

  "That's right. You mentioned Mondays at supper."

  "Mondays wouldn't be good?"

  "No, I think it would be good. It would be good for me."

  "For you?"

  "It would be good for me if you wanted to use my storefront on Mondays. I don't have my open house on Mondays."

  This storefront on Gaylord Street, about four blocks from where we're standing at the sink doing the dishes, is the storefront which her supporters rented for her at a very good price—during her successful campaign for alderman. She decided to hold onto it because she wanted a place where people could come see her who might be nervous or reluctant about seeing her in her office down to City Hall. She pays the rent out of her own pocket.

  She sees me hesitating and says, "Are you worried that people will think you've bolted the party and gone independent?"

  "No, I can find a way to make it clear where I stand. I'm just wondering if you're going to want me doing favors for people who are also your people."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, I open my doors—which are also your doors—to do favors for everybody who needs a favor, I'm going to make the point that it's the regular organization of the Democratic Party that's giving them a helping hand."

  "But you don't ask them for a promise to vote for your candidates?"

  "I don't ask—I never asked and I don't ask—but it's the understanding."

  "Well, I beat the candidate the regular organization put up against me before," she says, "so that doesn't worry me much. I think we're both after the same thing, Jimmy, doing what we can for people who need help."

  "I wouldn't argue with that."

  "So, will you accept my offer?"

  "Only if we can agree on what rent I'm going to pay you."

  "It's sitting there dark Monday nights."

  "There's heat and electricity. I don't like to ride for free."

  She leans across my shoulder and kisses me on the cheek and says, "When they balance up the books, Flannery, I have a feeling that you're going to be very heavy in the credit column," just as Mary comes lumbering back into the kitchen asking can she have a cup of herb tea, with my old man right behind her.

  "Well, what's going on here behind my back? Washing dishes, is it?" Mary says as she sits down in a kitchen chair.

  "Watch out if I ever decide to change my style," Janet says, laughing her big laugh.

  "That's one of the nice things about a woman of your persuasion," Mike says. "Your girlfriends don't have to worry about their husbands."

  Janet goes up behind Mike and hugs him—in her heels she's a little taller than he is—and lays a kiss on his ear.

  "Haven't you heard, the leopard sometimes changes its spots if tempted sufficiently. Besides, I've always had a secret yen for fair-skinned Irishmen, and . . ."

  "And what?" he says.

  "Don't forget the powerful attraction ladies of any and all persuasions have about older men. Every woman in the world is looking for her daddy, one way or another."

  SIX

  I start putting out the word the next day that I'm going to have office hours in the storefront the next Monday and every Monday thereafter and so on between the hours of six o'clock in the evening and whenever.

 

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