A Pure Double Cross by John Knoerle Page B

collected the merchant payoffs last Friday. Today was Thursday. I had one day to get with Agent Schram and set up a tag team shag.
    I bent to my task, dunking and scrubbing. The blood spots went away. Mrs. Brennan had added a slug of peroxide to the bucket of suds. I wasn’t the first boarder to bleed all over her carpet.

Chapter Eighteen
    Friday, 5 p.m. My sophisticated tag team tail operation pulled up a block from Mrs. Brennan’s rooming house right on time. Moon-faced Wally in a ’39 Hudson. I climbed in and bumped my head on cold steel. The car had no headliner.
    â€œYou’re it?”
    â€œI’m it,” said Wally.
    I gave him the address. Wally ground the column shift into first gear and the Hudson bucked and snorted up Winslow to W. 25 th .
    I had not been able to get Schram on the line the previous day, the Assistant Special Agent was ‘indisposed.’ I’d talked to beefy linebacker Joe Gilliam instead, told him I might have a way to locate the quarry, the elusive Mr. Big. Agent Gilliam said what do you want and when do you want it. Wally the office boy in a ’39 Hudson was the result.
    â€œThis heap have a second gear?” I asked as we crawled south on W. 25 th .
    â€œIt’s around here somewhere,” said Wally. We lurched into gear and set sail down the street. Christ, guy even drove with a limp.
    We turned west on Lorain. We passed the St. Ignatius High School baseball diamond. Dozens of kids in knit caps, scarves flying, were ice skating around the infield in the glimmering dusk.
    â€œFire department does that every year,” said Wally. “Floods the field for a rink.”
    â€œNice.”
    Wally blathered on. About how he loved ice-skating as a kid, where he went to school, how his mother made her famousfive-way chili, how he loved baseball and who his favorite players were and how his bum leg kept him out of the service. This took about six blocks. When he came up for air I asked a question.
    â€œWhat’s the scuttlebutt around the office Wally? Is someone trying to put the squelch on this thing?” He turned south on Fulton Road. “Agent Schram for instance.”
    â€œNot him. They put him in the…you know.” Wally pointed at his head and spun his finger.
    â€œI’m sorry to hear that.”
    Wally drove, I puzzled. With Richard Schram out of the picture we should have had half the G-men in the Cleveland District lined up behind us in unmarked cars.
    â€œIf not Schram, who?”
    Wally dawdled behind a double decker bus for two blocks. “Well, I heard something in the men’s room. At HQ. I was on the crapper.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œTwo agents at the pisser, or washing up. I’m not sure. I heard running water.”
    â€œWhat else did you hear?”
    â€œThe one guy says to the other guy, ‘You know Mr. Big ain’t who they say it is. It’s not Teddy Biggs, it’s Louis Seltzer.’”
    Hokey smokes. Louis B. Seltzer. Editor-in-Chief of
The Cleveland Press,
the city’s reigning power broker, Mr. Cleveland himself!
    â€œAnd this is based on what?”
    â€œDunno,” said Wally. “But the other agent, the one he said it to, he says, ‘Tell me somethin’ I don’t know.’”
    Moo oil. Gossip. Bullshit rumors that circulate through offices like forced air heat. Still, it had a wonderfully perverse logic. The owner of
The Cleveland Press
issuing fiery editorials demanding the arrest and conviction of himself.
    I told Wally to turn right on Cesco. We approached H&R Manufacturing. “Better pull over here.”
    Wally curbed the Hudson. He turned his trusting moon face toward my mistrusting black and blue one and said, “The thing of it is, is that Louis Seltzer is short, like about five foot. They say he buys his suits in the boys’ department at Higbee’s. Why would they call him Mr. Big?”
    I managed to keep a straight face.