Page 1 of Shadow Ticket
1
When trouble comes to town, it usually takes the North Shore Line. What with tough times down the Lake in Chicago, changes in the wind, Prohibition repeal just around the corner, Big Al in the federal pokey in Atlanta, Outfit affairs grown jumpy and unpredictable, anybody needing an excuse to get out of town in a hurry comes breezing up here to Milwaukee, where it seldom gets more serious than somebody stole somebody’s fish.
Hicks McTaggart has been ankling around the Third Ward all day keeping an eye on a couple of tourists in Borsalinos and black camel hair overcoats up from the home office at 22nd and Wabash down the Lake, the Chicago Outfit handling whatever needs to be taken care of in Milwaukee since Vito Guardalabene cashed in his chips ten years ago, though Vito’s successor Pete Guardalabene is still considered head man in the Ward, gets his picture in the social pages smiling at weddings and so forth.
Loitering in the alleyway in back of Pasquale’s Bella Palermo, Hicks can hear sounds of noodle-flexing sociability, smell spaghetti sauce and garlic frying and sfinciuni bagherese baking over an olive-branch fire, and it’s making him hungry, though this close to payday his lunch menu is a thermos of coffee and a buttermilk cruller stashed in a pocket someplace.
The explosion when it comes seems to be from somewhere across the river and nearer the Lake. Forks and glassware pause between tabletop and mouth, as if everybody’s observing a moment of stillness, and nobody seems surprised.
It’s still the topic of conversation a little later when everybody comes piling out into the street.
“Come up lookin for a little peace and quiet, next thing you know…”
“Startin to sound like Chicago around here.”
Everybody is looking at everybody else like they’re all in on something. Beyond familiarity or indifference, some deep mischief is at work.
Over the next few hours till the happiness twins are back on the train again, Hicks gets to hear a number of different stories, related to gangland matrimonials or hooch heists everybody’s heard about before, not much of it helpful, even at the combination drug and hardware store plus lunch counter known as Oriental Drugs, heart and soul of the East Side and Hicks’s usual source of reliable lowdown in Milwaukee, and sometimes lunch when it isn’t too close to payday, which sends him instead over to Otto’s Oasis, a speak disguised as a neighborhood Imbisswagen, with a refreshments list ranging from hours-old bathtub product to blockade-run imports of the real McCoy, where by dumb luck he happens to arrive next to the kitchen door just at the exact moment Otto’s wife Hildegard is bringing a platterful of free lunch items out to the bar area, so while others are making grabs at Hildegard, Hicks, still brooding about the Sicilian food back at Pasquale’s, manages to divert enough eats his way to see him through a couple more hours at least.
—
Later back atthe Unamalgamated Ops detective agency, Hicks finds his boss, Boynt Crosstown, waiting on the doorsill, shoes beating a nervous eight to the bar.
“Flash bulletin,” grabbing Hicks and pretending to pull him by the necktie through the length of the shop and into his office, “just a minute’s all I ask.”
Hicks trying to stay professional, “Don’t suppose you happened to hear anything back around lunchtime…”
“Pineapples come and pineapples go, never mind that Santa Flavia Chamber of Commerce meeting, write me a memo, small change anymore, got us a ticket just in and it’s a lulu, I’m telling you this is the one’ll put us all swimming in the gravy…” and so forth.
“Wish you wouldn’t come to work when you’re like this, Boynt.”
“Sure, sure, well, this isn’t just daydreaming through the Depression for a change, I guarantee you there’s money in this, big money, I’veseenit!”
With Boynt this usually turns out to be an illegible IOU written in pencil on a wet bar napkin. Hicks tries to keep the doubts out of his face.
“This time it’s the goods, right there on the table, and green? Wisconsin before they started logging it off should only’ve been this green.”
“Too bad about my mattress, already over legal capacity, corners of bills hanging out, sure you understand—”
“You always worked too cheap,” Boynt headwagging, “even before the Crash you were dime-a-dance.” Reaching for a switch on his intercom, “Thessalie, would you mind fetching us in that file?”
“Whole different tax bracket up there in Shorewood, you people, ain’t it.” Boynt has come in for a major share of the class needling around here, which goes on at industrial sewing-machine tempo and pretty much nonstop, ever since a page from his confidential file mysteriously folded itself one day into a paper airplane and went sailing into the room where the mimeograph machine is, and before you could blink, copies found their way to everybody in the office, announcing Boynt’s yearly income at a bit north of ten grand, plus profit sharing in a number of side ventures we may someday hear the end of but not anytime soon.
Thessalie Wayward comes breezing in with a file folder of some size, which Boynt opens dramatically. Hicks spots a familiar tabloid clipping.
“What’s this, ol’ Bruno back in the picture once more?” referring to local multimillionaire Bruno Airmont, known throughout the dairy industry as the Al Capone of Cheese in Exile since one middle of the night not that many years ago having packed a trunk full of banknotes and skipped, “Supposed to be taking it easy in a hammock,” Hicks pretends to recall, “some remote tropical island nobody’s sure which, drinkin Singapore Slings out of a fire hose. What’s up, retirement’s making him a li’l restless?”
“Actually this one’s more about his daughter Daphne, with whom, if I’m not too misinformed, you have some history.”
“Long time ago,” reaching smokes out of his shirt pocket, latching one onto his lip, lighting up. “What’s she up to now?”
“Seems your old romance has just run off with a clarinet player in a swing band.”
“Keepin busy. Last I saw, she was supposed to be engaged to some North Shore loophound.”
“Just off the phone in fact with that happy fiancé himself, G. Rodney Flaunch of the Glencoe Flaunches, acting as spokesman for an assortment of interested parties who’ve just hired us, and let me point out, for this crowd the fee scale doesn’t seem like much of an object.”
“And the job would be…”
