Pigeon pie, p.1
Pigeon Pie, page 1
part #11 of Jimmy Flannery Series
Contents
Praise
Title Page
Copyright
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
Praise for Edgar Award-Winning Author Robert Campbell
“Campbell writes with wit and vigor. The comparison not unflattering is to Elmore Leonard.”
— Los Angeles Times
“Robert Campbell has his own sound; he is an awfully good writer.”
— Elmore Leonard
“Robert Campbell is one of the most stylish crime writers in the business.”
— New York Times
Praise for
Nibbled to Death by Ducks
“A pure joy. . . .Nibbled to Death by Ducks provides an entertaining look at the workings of Chicago ward politics even as it exposes the cynical greed of the health care industry. . .Campbell is skillful enough to tickle and chill us at the same time. This is a good one.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Campbell combines some memorable faces with a moody, atmospheric sense of life in a nursing home. . . .Reading a Flannery caper is always fun. . . .” — Chicago Tribune
Praise for
The Cat’s Meow
“A mystery series that. . .just keeps getting better.”
— Chicago Magazine
Praise for
Thinning The Turkey Herd
“Fast, lean, offbeat entertainment.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Flannery is Robert Campbell’s most endearing character, a down-to-earth political small-fry who believes in the system despite its faults. . .He’s at his best in Thinning the Turkey Herd. . .a delight—a man who reason's, coaxes, makes end runs, compromises but never gives up until he’s satisfied that he’s got it right.”
— The Cincinnati Post
Praise for Edgar Award Winner
The Junkyard Dog
“Dialogue so breezy it stings your eyeballs, spirited characterizations of Jimmy’s proud ethnic neighbors, and the ward healer’s cocky defense of the old ways, the old politics . . . You can’t help liking Jimmy Flannery.”
— New York Times Book Review
“This truly innovative private-eye character moves credibly through a brawling, tough-guy atmosphere in a plot that’s both twisty and witty.”
— ALA Booklist
“Written in an appealing argot, this mystery has full characters, a satisfying ending and a nice balance of hardboiled action and romantic tenderness.”
— Publishers Weekly
Pigeon Pie
Robert Campbell
Publisher’s Note
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998 Robert Campbell
All rights reserved.
Ayeshire Publishing
ONE
Every once in a while I'm telling a story and somebody says, "You already told us that," so I stop right on the dime; I don't finish the story. Later on some other person who was in the group comes up to me and says, "Tell me the rest of that story you was telling the other night, Jimmy, I never heard it before."
Sometimes I ask the person how come they didn't speak up and they almost always say they didn't want to be the one to make the rest of the crowd listen to something they already heard. Like it's a great sacrifice to hear somebody's story more than once.
When somebody starts telling a story I heard before, I listen real close. You'd be surprised how much you can learn about a person by listening to how they tell a story more than once, even more than twice.
Also, I been told that every time I tell a story more than once I tell it without changing hardly a word except maybe here and there. I wonder what that says about me.
Anyway, I'm going to tell you a story I know you ain't heard before because this is the first time I'm telling it.
First, even though you might already know me, I'm going to tell you that my name's Jimmy Flannery and that, until recently, I'm the Democratic leader of the Twenty-seventh Ward in the great city of Chicago. Now I'm the committeeman in the Eleventh, which I won't say any more about because that's part of the story.
That's pretty much the way I introduce myself to new people that I meet, and I meet plenty.
"Hi, I'm Jimmy Flannery," I say. "I work for the Democratic Party in your ward. If there's anything I can do for you, let me know."
I been in precinct and ward politics ever since I went down to see Chips Delvin—God rest his soul—the warlord of the Twenty-seventh and the sewer boss of the city when I was only a kid of twenty, just a couple years out of high school. He gives me a job down in the pipes and tells me to go out and knock on doors for the party that election year.
I guess I did okay because by the time 1986 rolls around I'm an inspector, reading meters and doing paperwork, and I'm also a precinct captain in the Twenty-seventh.
That's also the year when I meet my wife, Mary Ellen Dunne, who's a nurse over to Passavant Hospital and a volunteer at an abortion clinic on Sperry which gets bombed.
The next year we get married and three years and some months after that we have a baby. We name her Kathleen. She's six years old now and I dearly love her.
Now there's another baby on the way.
Lately I find myself wondering, how did it happen? How did I get to be a married man with a kid and another on the way, the party leader of a city ward and a man who works behind a desk most of the time?
Mary's being thoughtful the other day, sitting in the chair by the front window, the lace curtain pushed aside, looking out on the street shining in the rain. I ask her what she's thinking and she says, "You ever think about chrysalids?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"You know, chrysalises."
"You mean them hard cases caterpillars build around themselves so they can turn into butterflies?"
"That's right."
"Well, no, I don't think about them much," I say, humoring her a little bit—you know?—the way you should do with a pregnant woman.
"I wonder if the caterpillar, when it becomes a chrysalis, knows it's going to become a butterfly."
"It's something to think about."
"And do you think the butterfly, after it emerges from the chrysalis, remembers that it was once a caterpillar?"
"I'll give that a little thought, too."
She smiles at me in a soft way like she understands I hardly know what she's talking about but she'll forgive me because only another woman could possibly understand what she's saying.
But I know what she's talking about. I think.
What's the difference between being asleep and dormant? Between being dormant and dead? Between being young and—before you know it— you're old?
If you know what being old is.
My old man always says, "Whenever a youngster gives me lip, I tell them the big difference between them and me is that I remember what it was to be their age but they don't know what it is to be my age."
Sometimes I feel like I'm getting old though I'm not yet even what they call, nowadays, middle-aged.
I didn't see the years go by. Like I was sleeping in a chrysalis. So, if up to now I been a caterpillar, does that mean when I come out of the chrysalis I'm in I'll be a butterfly?
Old friends like Mrs. Banjo and my old Chinaman Chips Delvin has passed away. And a lot of other people that I knew.
But I won't go into naming them all or even some of them. Enough to say that a good part of a ward committeeman's job is going to christenings, weddings and funerals. So I see a lot of beginnings, middles and endings.
My father, Mike, is still hale and hearty, married to Mary's mother, Charlotte, for some time now.
My dog, Alfie, is getting old, his muzzle so gray it looks like he's been dipping into a saucer of milk but he's still as eager for a walk as he was when he first come into my life.
Mary's Aunt Sada has something wrong with her hip but won't walk with a cane, stubborn as she is.
I see some little lines around Mary's eyes and mouth, but when I kiss them I don't know they're there and wouldn't care if I did.
I see some gray in my red hair. I rue the day when there'll be so much white in it that people'll start calling me "Pinkie." After Delvin dies and leaves me the leadership of the Twenty-seventh Ward and his house in Bridgeport, a neighborhood what don't change very much, in the Eleventh Ward, I had to leave the six-flat—one of them converted into a mom-and-pop grocery store run by Joe Pakula and his sister, Pearl—in which I lived for years. I'd even bought a share in it to keep it from getting tore down.
We move into Delvin's house which is, luckily, almost as familiar to me as my own.
Mary
Last year I was offered a chance for a big change.
Leo the Lion Lundatos, the once powerful member of the United States Congress, indicted on thirty felony counts, which was mostly about fraud and abuse of privilege, ain't taking the loss of his seat in the last election without fighting back. He wants to establish a new power base by going back into city politics.
He wants to run for alderman of the Eleventh, known as the Mayor's Ward, and invites me to be his committeeman, otherwise known as the ward leader or warlord. It don't take a rocket scientist to see what he's up to. He has his eyes on being mayor one day even though he's seventy when he starts this new push for power. I got to hand it to him, the moxie he has.
I don't tell him that the alderman don't pick his own committeeman. It's an elective office decided during the regular party primaries. Although it's true that a deserving party worker can be appointed to the post by the state Democratic Party in the case of death or retirement, giving said deserving person a jump start when he or she comes up for election. But even though that happens to me when Delvin hands me the palm, it don't happen very often anymore.
Anyway, I don't correct him or remind him. I just mumble something about me already being committeeman of the Twenty-seventh and very happy in my neighborhood.
I tell him I don't know why he wants me as the committeeman in the first place. If he wants to get back into politics by becoming the alderman in the Eleventh, there's plenty of people who'd be happy to oblige him.
I point out to him that I got a reputation for being something of a rebel and have refused more offers to join the club than you can count. He tells me that it's because I've got a reputation as an honest man, who honors his debts when he can and makes accommodations when he can't, that he wants me. He also adds that he'd been told I'm practically incorruptible, which I've learned is a remark in the same family as "trust me on this one."
Not that I want to sound cynical or ungrateful for the compliment. But I think that he's thinking an honest, incorruptible person makes a nice balance for hisself, who's carrying around the reputation of being something of a crook.
Of course, being a little bit of a crook is not altogether a bad reputation for a Chicago politician to have.
So I say thanks but no thanks.
But he persists, throwing a lot of tempting arguments in my face, not the least of which is his wife, Maggie. Not that she's ready to be bought or sold by Lundatos or anybody else, but there's an impression she gives that their marriage has sort of run out of steam and become just one of practical mutual benefit. There's a lot of power couples out there what stick together for the social and political convenience in being married. They got separate personal lives on the side but keep them under wraps.
It was whispered around that some of the "nieces" and "cousins" on his payroll when he was a congressman weren't there to take shorthand, especially one who was paid for working in Washington but lived in Chicago.
Even so he was pretty discreet compared to some.
Whether Maggie knew about the love nest Lundatos had set up in a building she owned before Fay Wray was found dead there, is a question to which I never did get a completely satisfying answer. And whether she had her own playmates and intimate companions unbeknownst to her husband or anybody else is another puzzler. There was no gossip going on about her at the time.
If she'd even consider such a thing, I'd bet a million any fooling around she might do would be with a person of her choice and not to satisfy any political aspiration Leo might have. Which don't mean that his accommodations and her accommodations couldn't coincide.
Whatever the situation, I still have the feeling when we meet that the offer's there if I want to reach out.
Anyway Lundatos's plan gets shot down when a new scandal breaks over his head. The call girl of mature age I just mentioned is found dead and his association with her is found out and there's about to be a cover-up. After we find out it's the call girl's husband what did her, Leo thinks he's going to walk off without a trace of mud on his cuffs.
I go to him with some tapes I obtain from Willy Dink, an old friend of mine who used to be an exterminator but is now into discreet investigations, and tell him that quitting the contest for alderman would be the smartest thing he could do.
He asks me if I'm one of those people who wouldn't mind if he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar but would mind very much if it got caught in a honey pot.
I tell him I ain't his conscience but that I do believe every candidate for public office should be better than he is at keeping his private affairs private.
He wants to debate the subject, trying to tie me up with considerations of special community standards, the greater good and other such diversions meant to twist the truth, but I don't go along with him. I tell him I'll do what I think I have to do if he goes ahead with building a new political career in the city. So he agrees never to run for public office again.
Which I don't entirely believe at that moment but which, the way things play out, could very well come true.
I think the indictments they got ready to bring against him will just blow away after he loses his congressional seat and drops out of the public eye. But the Republicans in Congress are on a roll and want to trash the Democrats every which way they can, so they let Lundatos know they ain't about to drop all of the charges against him. He's going to have to cut a deal and pay a price or go to trial.
Then these so-called informed rumors start sneaking out.
One of the defenses Lundatos supporters was using was the fact that under the rules then in place the Lion could've taken retirement and walked away with over a million dollars in unspent campaign contributions in his pocket. So what was all this nickel-and-dime stuff about crystal paperweights and a cousin on the payroll?
But his enemies start putting out the word that he has a stash of bribes and illegal contributions amounting to three times the million and he was staying in office as long as he could because he was hungry for more and wants to move the stash before some special prosecutor's men find it.
He cuts a deal and takes twenty-eight months in a Club Fed, one of them prisons without bars or fences set up for white-collar thieves, stock manipulators, extortionists, forgers and other such criminals against property instead of persons.
Fleece the innocent out of millions and have a vacation in a prison that could be a resort. Sell two ounces of pot and, in some states, pull ten hard.
It's another way the rich and well connected has of protecting themselves from the consequences of their crimes.
None of this spoils my chances for running for committeeman in the Eleventh if I decide to go ahead with it. In fact they get better.
The mayor calls me down to the fifth floor at City Hall and says, "I understand that our friend Leo Lundatos has decided to retire from public life."
"Yes, your honor, that's what I've been told."
"Before he left on his retreat, he called to have a last chat, and told me he was ready to back you if you decided to run for alderman in the Eleventh."
"For committeeman, I think."
"For alderman. For both if you want it. Even with Lundatos unable to run for office, Johnny O'Meara's getting tired of the game. He might be persuaded to step aside and grease the way for you. First he'll vacate the committeeman's job and sometime next year, before the elections, he'll retire from the city council, naming you his logical successor just before the voting."
"Why didn't O'Meara offer to retire so Lundatos could've been appointed to fill out his term?" I ask.
"Because Leo wanted to run and win just to prove the point to his enemies that he could make his comeback the hard way," the mayor says.
I'm thinking about what benefits O'Meara expected to get from Lundatos even for not running for reelection, which after all would make the effort just that much easier.
What inducement will he expect from me for turning the jobs over to me without me even having to run for them the first time?
