The lions share, p.1
The Lion's Share, page 1
part #10 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
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
The Lion’s Share
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 © 1996 Robert Campbell
All rights reserved.
Ayeshire Publishing
ONE
My name's Jimmy Flannery. I'm so used to saying that up front, the occupation that I'm in, that sometimes I forget and stick out my hand and say, "Hi, I'm Jimmy Flannery," to people I've known for twenty years.
My old man, Mike, who's crowding seventy, laughs when he catches me doing that and lets everybody know that he's getting worried about a son that's so forgetful.
"With some people it's the memory goes first, not the legs," he says.
He could be right, though I got an idea my generation don't exercise our memories the way his generation exercised theirs, what with all the databases and speed dials and watches what buzz you when it's time to call your wife.
I hate to think what the next generation's going to do if they find themselves stranded somewheres without their cellular phones or notebook computers; they'll probably just stand there going through the alphabet, the way Mrs. Brody in the fifth grade taught us to do to try and jog our memories, in hopes that a letter will remind them of their own name.
Also it has to do with how many people you meet from day to day and under what circumstances. I mean a lot of people don't meet more than one person they got to remember for the future in a week.
They could meet hundreds every day—nodding and smiling and saying how are you?—like the checker at the supermarket, which is outside my neighborhood, where I buy my staples. I'll bet we've said hello a thousand times but never even passed the time of day. She's busy and the boss is pushing her and she just wants you to keep moving along so she can do her seven and a half and go on home to rest her feet. Also she's not required to recognize you on the street, so she probably won't.
Not like Joe and Pearl what own the grocery store downstairs in the five-family and a shop building where me and my wife, Mary, and our little girl, Kathleen, live. Sometimes when I go in there for a quart of milk or a loaf of bread, it's an hour before I can get away, because we talk, me and Joe and Pearl and the customers.
They tell me their troubles, first because I try to listen, and second because I been a worker in the precincts since 1978, a precinct captain in the Twenty-seventh for fourteen years and the committeeman, which is like the ward leader for the Democratic Party, for five. Eighteen years in Chicago politics, which I love, altogether.
Being a party worker ain't my paid job. For wages I put in forty hours a week as a sewer inspector in the Sewer Department under Streets and Sanitation. Before I became an inspector I walked the tunnels for ten years and that was no fun.
I owe both of these careers to Chips Delvin, who's been my Chinaman since he got me my first job in the sewers and my first assignment knocking on doors for the party at election time. For which I'm very grateful. Though I don't thank him very often for putting me down in the sewers the way he done.
But I got a feeling that what you end up doing chooses you as much as you choose it.
Anyway, after he kind of anointed me his heir in a half-assed sort of way, I'm halfway to becoming him, because although I ain't head of the Sewer Department like he was for almost forty years, I am the committeeman for the ward in which I live. I probably never will be the superintendent of sewers what with these talent searches they have for department heads where they interview kids with degrees just fresh out of college.
I'm doing what I can to improve myself, taking classes in adult education, working toward a degree in the great by-and-by, but it's a slow way of doing it. One of these fine days I'll just have to bite the bullet and carry a full course load of credits in some community college I could afford.
I was thinking maybe city management, or political science, or that good old standby for everybody looking to climb the political ladder...the law.
When Delvin and Dunleavy, who could be even a couple of years older than Delvin and runs Streets and Sanitation for even longer than Delvin runs the sewers, was starting out, it was more favor for favor than it is today, especially after the Shankman court decree which outlawed political hiring and firing, taking most city jobs out from under political influence. Though it ain't possible to rule out that way of doing business altogether and still say this is the city that works. There's always somebody ready to cut the corner, bend the angle and wink the eye and I ain't sure that's always and altogether a bad thing.
I'm sitting by the open window in the kitchen on a summer morning on my day off, making like a horsey with my daughter on my knee, the Tribune in one hand and eating cereal with two percent milk with the other, when Mary asks me what I'm thinking about.
Whenever one of us asks the other one what's on our mind we don't duck the question, we try to answer it. When it's something off the wall, we even try to trace the thought back to see what could have triggered it.
So I tell her I was thinking of these old-timers and what it was like when they was young, me thinking of them as being young, though I'm about the same age they was then but feeling kind of middle-aged right that minute.
"You're not that old," Mary says.
"I didn't say old, I said middle-aged."
It's funny the way we talk about different ages and getting older. I mean the way it is nowadays you're just starting into middle age when you reach seventy. So when you maybe kick off a couple of years later everybody says, my God, such a young person.
Mary takes Kathleen from me and puts her in the high chair because Kathleen has a tendency to get overexcited playing horsey.
"How would you measure middle age, Jimmy?" she asks.
"All right, let's say it's like in the Bible, human beings live roughly three score and ten. Seventy years, give or take. So half of seventy is thirty-five, right in the middle. From when you're born to the age of ten, you could call that childhood. I won't count that because you're learning what you need to know to start operating even a little bit. So, okay, we'll move the middle to forty."
"That's all right with m
"From ten to twenty, we're in our youth. Twenty to thirty, young adulthood. Thirty to fifty, middle age."
"You doubled up there, Jimmy."
"Well, if forty's the middle, I'm taking ten years on either side. So fifty to sixty, you're in your maturity."
"Most people would call fifty to sixty pretty young, but I wouldn't mind it said of me that I was in my maturity when I turn fifty," she says.
"Well, that's a whole new factor we got there. They say a man peaks sexually when he's eighteen or twenty. A woman's in her prime when she reaches thirty-five or forty. So the way you could look at it is—"
"You'll be all used up just when I'm about to work up an appetite."
"Maybe we shouldn't be talking like this in front of Kathleen," I say.
"Oh, yes, I'm sure she's taking notes. So, all right, if you're happier analyzing chronological age instead of sexual ability, go ahead."
"Sixty to seventy you're in your old age, although you might not be anywhere near gaga."
"Not everybody goes gaga," she says, sticking her oar in there.
"By the time you're seventy you're in old age and at eighty you're ancient," I goes on. "At ninety I can't imagine."
"There's some talk about moving the traditional year of retirement up to seventy-five," she says. "People living so much longer is one of the reasons why Medicare is going broke and Social Security apt to do so down the line."
"Well, I got nothing against that. At least I don't think I do."
"What got you thinking about all this?" she asks.
"Well, like I said, I was thinking about Delvin and Dunleavy."
"But what got you thinking about them?"
"I was thinking I might go over to see my old Chinaman this morning and maybe even go over to Streets and Sanitation to see Dunleavy this afternoon, even though I ain't got a favor to ask from him. On the other hand, it might give him a shock, me visiting without a favor to ask, so maybe I better not."
The phone rings and I go answer it.
It's Mrs. Thimble, Delvin's housekeeper.
"Can you come over right away, Mr. Flannery?" she says. "Mr. Delvin passed away in his sleep during the night. I found him ten minutes ago when I went in to bring him his tea."
"Oh, dear," I say, mostly to myself, "I hope this ain't the short beginning to a long ending."
I don't know what makes me say that, except that Delvin's done a lot of borderline things in his long career and I'm hoping, now that he's gone, a whole bunch of skeletons don't come dancing out of his closet.
TWO
It's beautiful summer weather outside when I go over to Delvin's old house on Aberdeen in Bridgeport, which along with Canaryville is in the Eleventh Ward. It was the old mayor's neighborhood all his life and Delvin's neighborhood, too.
It's a holdout ward and a holdout neighborhood. By which I mean going into Bridgeport is like going into one end of a time machine and out the other. It's a neighborhood what's got a history what's intact. It's everywhere you look, in the frame houses and brick bungalows, the solid old Catholic churches anchoring the faith, and the taverns like Schaller's Pump at Thirty-seventh and Halsted right across the street from ward Democratic Headquarters. There's white-haired men inside who'll tell you tales their fathers told them about how the Irish, unable to vote back home under English rule, took to politics like ducks to water and elected first John Hopkins in the 1880s and then Edward Dunne, who took the mayor's seat in 1905 and warmed it for two years.
How settlers built houses along the south branch of the river, which was later, after the stockyards went in, called Bubbly Creek because of the gas produced by rotting carcasses, and in a place called Hardscrabble or the Cabbage Patch because everybody grew cabbages for the pot.
It got to be called Bridgeport because there was this low bridge crossing the river at Ashland the barges couldn't pass underneath, so the barges had to unload one side and reload onto new barges the other.
Sometimes I wonder who the wise guy was what built that low bridge and how he probably lined his pockets by doing it.
And they'll tell you stories they was eyewitness to, or actually involved in, about Ed Kelly, who took office in 1933, after Anton Cermak was assassinated in the attempt on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, some saying Cermak was the target all along, and sat there on top of a pile of favors and deals until they kicked him out in '47 because he went too far.
But the hero of most of the tales is the late Richard J. Daley, the Democratic Party's and the Irishmen's finest flower.
Daley "maintained the mood" of Bridgeport, they say, by excluding blacks, even building the Dan Ryan Expressway, they say, keeping Bridgeport and Canaryville separate from the black wards. It remains so still.
I ain't going to make an argument for or against segregation of wards or neighborhoods, schools or churches, or any other public institution or facility for that matter. I don't live that way, but I ain't going to say something which always upsets me whenever I hear it said. I ain't going to say some of my best friends is African Americans because that's more like saying you harbor some feelings of prejudice and feel you got to deny it by saying such a thing. Showing what a nice liberal person you are. I've been in the homes of people with every color and shade of skin you can name, and sat down to a meal with them, and cried with them when they was hurting, and sat up with their dead, but now I got to say some thing else which is also true. I get a sweet, funny feeling when I go into Bridgeport. Not that I believe that business about the past being basically gentler or more innocent. But I want to believe it and I get this good feeling when I go over to Delvin's even on such a sorrowful occasion.
I'm already thinking about what funeral arrangements I'm going to have to make because I don't know who else is going to do it.
Mrs. Thimble meets me at the door. She's so upset, though she's trying not to show it, that she don't even scold me for not wiping my feet or anything like that.
The hallway don't smell as dusty and musty as it usually smells. It smells of candle wax and sage so I know she's lit some candles to put at the head and foot of his bed, and burned some spices in a dish to mask the odor of death which some people claim they can smell a mile away.
"You call the doctor?" I ask.
"No, I called you," she says.
"You happen to know his doctor's number offhand?"
She rattles it off to me and adds, "He lives just down the block."
I dial the number on the old rotary phone and Dr. Squertsky himself picks up.
"This is Jimmy Flannery."
"Delvin's friend?" he says.
"That's right. Mr. Delvin passed away during the night."
"I'm not surprised. It could have happened any minute."
"I'm about to call the undertaker and I'll need a death certificate."
"Give me ten minutes and I'll be right over."
I hang up and start on what comes next.
"You happen to know what undertaker Mr. Delvin wanted to lay him out?"
"When he mentioned it at all, he said we should tear up the floor in the corner of Schaller's Pump and bury him under it in a beer barrel. It was a joke. He didn't mean it."
"I think you're right. So he never said who he'd like to do the honors?"
"Well, there was one time when he joked about how Lou Cleary—"
"The cop," I say, not wanting to interrupt, but merely indicating I know the gentleman in question.
"—was retiring from the force and how he was going to go into his son-in-law's—"
"Jackie Diversey," I say, by way of naming the connection.
"—undertaking business," she goes right on, taking no offense at me commenting while she's talking. "He thought it might be nice to throw a little business Cleary's way, he said."
"I wonder did he think there was a way to get back a favor for the favor?" I say, half to myself, remembering that O'Shea, this homicide cop what don't like me very much or at least does a very good job of pretending he don't, is married to Jackie Diversey's sister. So what you got is you got an awful lot of cops what got connections with this funeral parlor to which a lot of business finds its way.
