Had I been used? Had Helen—or rather Sally Rand—blewed, screwed, and tattooed her old pal just to get his help in landing some decent Windy City bookings?
Probably, but I didn’t give a damn. I was glad to help her out. And I was glad to have that kind of wild sex, at any age.
“I could talk to the guy at the Chez Paree,” I said. Michael Satariano was running it for the Outfit, and I knew him pretty well. “And the Empire Room’s always a possibility.”
She brightened, her smile splitting her face, but in a good way. “Would you do that, Nate? Could you
do
that?”
That was when the sound of somebody banging on the door downstairs interrupted us.
“What the hell,” I said.
The banging, clearly a fist hammering at the door, continued. Rattling the hell out of it.
I got out of bed, tossed on my slacks without my shorts, and got the nine-millimeter off the dresser.
“Nate!” she said.
“Just a precaution.” That business with Tom Ellison and Jack Ruby had made me paranoid, I guess. “You stay.”
I padded down the spiral staircase into the living room, as the banging kept up, but realizing now that whoever it was was not at the front door of my apartment, rather the door below, to the safe house.
Which nobody was staying in right now.
Somebody was assuming that
that
door was mine—it was ground-level, after all, snugged under the wrought-iron stairway that led to my actual entry.
I went to the front row of windows, kneeling on the couch where Helen and I had earlier sat. Drew back the curtain. I could get an angle down on the guy knocking.
And he was still going at it, hammering.
“I
know
you’re in there, Heller!” he said, speaking for the first time. His voice was low-pitched and not happy. Also not elegant.
Very quietly, I opened my front door, sticking my head out into the crisp fall night, looking down through the crosshatch of the wrought-iron porch to see if my caller noticed me coming out.
He didn’t.
Who he was remained a mystery—the top of his hatless head wasn’t all that expressive—but he was yelling at me to answer him, loud enough for me not to be heard slipping down those stairs to come up behind him in my bare chest and bare feet and hastily half-zipped trousers and put the nose of the nine-millimeter in the back of his neck.
“You wanted something?” I said.
“… Is that a gun?”
“Part of one. The part the fire and bullet come out.”
“Are you Heller?”
“Yeah. Who are you?”
He put his hands up. He was just a big dark shape in a big dark topcoat. His hair was black and cropped short and his neck was no bigger around than an oak tree.
In his upraised left hand was an envelope.
“What the hell,” I said. “Are you a process server?”
“No,” he said. “I’m just an unlucky working stiff who got tagged for an errand on a Saturday night.”
“Stop or I’ll bust out crying. Who the fuck are you?”
“We ain’t met. I’m just a guy that works for a mutual friend. Could I please turn around? And could you please take that gun out of my fuckin’ neck? Please?”
I did, and he did.
He was right—I didn’t recognize him. He was just a goon with a nose that had been broken frequently enough to call into question it being a nose at all anymore. His eyes were big and wide-set and his mouth was tiny, giving him an odd look, like the Keane kid paintings at George Diamond’s.
“This envelope is for you,” he said.
I took it with my left hand.
Very carefully, still with my left, I opened it, the nine-mil trained on my guest. He seemed relaxed now, but I wasn’t.
I peeked in at its contents.
“Tickets?” I said.
“Tickets, yeah.”
“To the
Bears
game tomorrow?”
The guy grinned, as much as his tiny mouth allowed, anyway. “That’s two tickets, you will note. In case you should wanna bring somebody with.”
“Who sent these?”
“Didn’t I say? That’s completely my fault. Those are box seats, Mr. Heller. You’ll be joining the boss with his compliments.”
I winced and said, “Don’t
tell
me…”
But, right before he put his hands down and slipped by me with a jaunty little salute, he did.
“Mr. Hoffa looks forward to seein’ you there.”
CHAPTER
5
Sunday, October 27, 1963
Late morning at Wrigley Field, sunny but cool with typical gusts off the lake, made for perfect football weather—about sixty degrees, pleasantly crisp, just right for light jackets. But with a noon game, you saw plenty of guys salted around the stands in ties and suits or sport coats, having come directly from church. And everybody, including me, wore a hat.
Everybody but our host, who wore his butch haircut like a badge of honor.
Jimmy Hoffa’s box seat worth of questionable cronies—with a row of their overdressed, overly made-up wives at the back of the metal railed-off area—had not come from church. Neither had my date and I.
Her dark-blonde hair up and in curls, Helen was in a navy-blue dress with a white Peter Pan collar with cameo brooch, looking more like a particularly demure sorority sister than the world’s most famous fan dancer. I was in a collarless gray McGregor woolen jacket, zipped to my throat, looking like a priest in some very modern, nonexistent sect.
About a dozen of us were snugged into these box seats, which did not belong to the Teamsters, exactly—they were courtesy of attorney Allen Dorfman’s insurance agency, which handled the union’s pension fund. A slim, solemn, hawkish-looking guy with Groucho eyebrows, Dorfman was the son of Red Dorfman (not present), a longtime Outfit crony currently playing on Giancana’s team.
Red’s son Allen was one of the few of this little group in a sport coat, but without tie, shirt open, if button-down. Most of the rest were in heavy jackets and caps, attire you might unload a truck in. But for the cap, the same was true of Hoffa, his coat a lumberjack red-and-black plaid.
Maybe that was image. Hoffa was an everyman by nature and inclination, and anybody stopping by the box to say hello and wave—whether calling him a respectful “Mr. Hoffa” or a too-familiar “Jimmy”—got a smile and a wave back.
People were always surprised by Hoffa—by his size, which despite his broad-shouldered brawn added up only to five feet five and maybe 150 pounds; but also by his friendliness, since TV watchers had often seen him mad, like when he battled reporters or alternately smirked and snarled at Bobby Kennedy in that famous rackets committee hearing.
Hoffa, who was about fifty, was sitting next to me. He’d been happy to meet Helen (“Sally Rand! You was my first crush!”) before she got shuttled to the back row with the wives. Around us was an array of lawyers and thieves—with considerable crossover—including not just Dorfman but heavy-set, bespectacled, respectable-looking attorney William Bufalino, a master at telling Jim what he wanted to hear; and fat, frog-like Joey Glimco, a scowling Outfit killer turned labor leader. None of them spoke to me, though Dorfman nodded.
Absent was Hoffa’s menacing three-hundred-plus-pound bodyguard, Barney Baker, convicted extortionist, the terms of whose parole prevented participation in anything union-related. Apparently including football games.
“So whaddya think of these seats?” Hoffa asked.
His grin was hard to read. Funny thing about that vaguely Oriental mug of his—the features were those of a roughneck, all right, but there was a pixie sparkle to his eyes and his smile.
I did not play yes-man to Jim, unless it really mattered. If my livelihood, say, or maybe my life wasn’t on the line, I played the role of trusted truth sayer.
So I said, “Well, they stink, Jim. If this was the Cubs playing, we’d be in clover.”
“I know, I know.”
He shook his head like it was a naughty child, the glistening black chopped-off porcupine quills of his butch impervious to the motion or for that matter the wind off Lake Michigan.
“Blame Dorfman,” he said, loud enough for the lawyer to hear. “What the fuck are they playin’ football for at Wrigley Field, anyway? Do they play basketball in a swimming pool?”
Hoffa had a point. Even if that famous red sign out front was changed from
HOME OF THE CUBS
to
HOME OF THE BEARS
for football season, this was still a baseball park. To go gridiron meant reconfiguring the field, leaving us with box seats that were heaven for baseball season—right behind home plate—but hell for football, where those same seats put us at a corner of the end zone. That made the cheap seats—temporary bleachers out in right field—worthy of envy.
Not that I gave a damn. I was not a football fan, neither college nor pro, and I wasn’t even a baseball fan, really. And to the degree that I did care about the latter, I preferred the White Sox, if for no other reason than owner Bill Veeck was a pal who occasionally threw a job the A-1’s way.
But I knew enough to follow the game, even if I was already bored. We were still in the first quarter, and the only excitement so far, if you could call it that, was a forty-five-yard field goal for the Bears by Roger LeClerc. But they’d been down at the other end of the field, so whoop de do.
Hoffa seemed in pretty high spirits, though, a small miracle considering he had two major federal indictments hanging over him, one for fraud, the other for jury tampering. I’d seen him twice this year, and both times he had seemed short-tempered and moody, even for him.
Not that I ever really had any trouble with Hoffa.
We had hit it off right from the start—he was Dutch-Irish, I was half Irish, half German Jew. My father had been a West Side unionist whose rabble-rousing activities in Chicago were legend. That sat well with Jim, who often spoke as if he’d known my old man (he hadn’t, and my father would have abhorred Hoffa’s shady dealings).
So Jim had never suspected, a few years back, that I was working as a double agent for the rackets committee. Well, he had a good reason for that: he
thought
I was working as
his
double agent.
I know, I know … it’s hard to believe he actually figured he could buy off a Chicago detective.…
Still, there was much to admire about James Riddle Hoffa. His background had been (to use one of my old man’s favorite expressions) rougher than a cob, his coal miner father dying young, his hardworking mother making ends meet by polishing radiator caps in an auto plant.
As a teenager Jim pulled down fifteen bucks a week unloading trucks for a grocery chain. But it pissed him off that he didn’t get paid for the time he spent waiting for the truckloads of fruits and vegetables to arrive … so he organized a wildcat strike. He was sixteen. Soon he was on the Teamsters payroll where, obviously, he still was.
Say what you will, the little bulldog was one effective union leader, negotiating any number of generous contracts for his members. But his ties to the mob—not to mention the Republicans—had made him a target for the Kennedys. And soon Jack and particularly Bobby became this working-class Ahab’s white whale.
And, funny thing—he was theirs.
“Booby’s entire fucking law experience,” Hoffa had once ranted to me, “Booby” being his contemptuous way of referring to Robert Kennedy, “was servin’ as counsel on that one fucking candy-ass committee! And his
brother
appoints him attorney goddamn general? Hypocritical little silver-spoon shits! And their
old man
was the biggest bootlegger of ’em all!”
Indeed, Bobby’s first big action as AG was to start up the “Get Hoffa Squad.” More than twenty prosecutors and investigators were on staff full-time to make cases against Hoffa, and not just recent offenses, but going back and opening up cases the Eisenhower administration had dropped.
What I knew that perhaps Hoffa did not was that the “Get Hoffa Squad” was merely part of Bobby’s overall campaign, Operation Big Squeeze, aimed at the Mafia and their allies.
Like the Teamsters.
“You know who has good seats?” Hoffa asked.
“No. Who?”
He wiggled a finger toward the fifty-yard line. “That pal of yours. From Milwaukee.”
Hoffa turned his face to the field, but I kept looking his way. The Teamster boss was still smiling, if faintly. Around us, his guys were drinking beer and gnawing hot dogs and enjoying the game despite the shitty seats, and the women in their private row were chattering, ignoring the game, asking Sally Rand lots of questions, Helen obviously charming them. A gust of wind came up and I was chilled but I’d been chilled before the gust.
So—Ruby really had made me as Tom Ellison’s chaperone.
And Jake or Jack or whatever the fuck you want to call him had reported back to somebody who had got word to Hoffa—how many steps that had taken, how many somebodies, I had no idea.
But Hoffa
knew
.
From the moment I’d looked in the envelope his goon had delivered last night, I had wondered if the job for Tom was why I’d been invited today, hoping of course that it wasn’t. That Hoffa had happened to be in Chicago, where after all the fraud case was to be tried, maybe here to confer with his legal team, and thought of his old Chicago buddy Nate Heller, and sent a couple of tickets over, and … not really. My gut had told me Hoffa
had
to know.
Just the same, having him look at me and so casually mention Tom, sitting on the fifty-yard line, scared the crap out of me.
“This game sucks green donkey dick,” Hoffa pronounced. “I gotta pee. How about you, Heller? You probably gotta pee, too.”
“Now that you mention it.”
I slid out of the seats and moved to the opening in the railing, stepped out and then waited for Hoffa, because he would, of course, lead the way. Up the steps he went, often pausing and shaking hands, even stopping to talk, a confident, even cocky little figure in his workingman’s jacket, high-water pants, and white socks. And every guy he shook hands with winced, which did not surprise me, because that banty rooster had a grip like a vise.