True Detective by Max Allan Collins Read Free Book Online Page A

that business- either on Uncle Louis' high scale or his own low one- would be something I'd avoid; and I always assured him that he needn't worry about my following either of those courses of action. The only thing I had tried to make clear, since I was about ten years old, was my desire to be a detective when I grew up. Pa took that as seriously as most fathers would; but some kids
do
grow up to be firemen, you know. And when I kept talking about it on into my early twenties, he should've paid attention. But that's something parents rarely do. They demand attention; they don't give it. But then the same is true of children, isn't it?
    To his credit, when he gave me the five hundred dollars he'd been saving for God knows how long, he said that it was a graduation gift, no strings, though he admitted to hoping I would use it for college. To my credit, I did; I went to Crane Junior College for two years, during which time Pa's business seemed to be less than prospering, with him alone in the shop, closing down occasionally because of headaches. When I went back to help him there, he assumed I was working to save up and go on for another two years of college. I assumed he realized I'd decided two years was enough. Typically, we didn't speak about this and went our merry private ways, assuming the hell out of things.
    We had our first argument the day I told him I was applying for a job with the Chicago P.D. It was the first time Pa ever really shouted at me (and one of the last: he reverted to sarcasm and contempt thereafter, the arguments continuing but staying low-key if intense) and it shocked me; and I think I shocked him by standing up to him. He hadn't noticed I wasn't a kid, despite my being twenty-four at the time. When he finished shouting, he laughed at me. You'll never get a job with the cops, he said. You got no clout, you got no money, you got no prayer. And the argument was over.
    I never told my father that my Uncle Louis had arranged my getting on the force; but it was obvious. Like Pa said, you needed patronage, or money to buy in. to get a city job. So I went to the only person I knew in Chicago who was really somebody, which was Uncle Louis (never Lou), who was by now a full VP with the Dawes Bank. I went to him for advice.
    And he said, "You've never asked anything of me, Nate. And you're not asking now. But I'm going to give you a present. Don't expect anything else from me, ever. But this present I will arrange." I asked him how. He said, "I'll speak to A.J." A.J. was Cermak, not yet mayor, but a powerful man in the city.
    And I made the force. And it was never the same between Pa and me, though I continued to live at home. My role in "cracking" the Lingle case got me promoted to plainclothes after two years on traffic detail; and it was shortly after that that my father put my gun to his head.
    The same gun I had used today, to kill some damn kid in Frank Nitti's office.
    "So I quit" I told Barney.
    Barney was Barney Ross, who as you may remember was one of the great professional boxers of his time, and that time was now; he was the top lightweight contender in the country, knocking on champion Tony Canzoneri's door. He was a West Side kid. too. another Maxwell Street expatriate. Actually, Barney still
was
a kid: twenty-three or twenty-four, a handsome bulldog with a smile that split his face whenever he chose to use it, which was often.
    I knew Barney since he was baby Barney Rasofsky. His family was strictly Orthodox, and come Friday sundown could do no work till after Saturday. Barney's pa was so strict they even ripped toilet paper into strips so the family wouldn't be tearing paper on the
Shabbes
. For about a year, when I was seven or eight, right before we moved out of Maxwell Street, I turned on the gas and did other errands for the Rasofskys, as their
Shabbes gov
, since I was as un-Orthodox as my pa. Later, when I was a teenager in Douglas Park, I'd come back to Maxwell Street on Sundays, to work