Mr. Contreras blew his nose with a final flourish. “I knew I could count on you, doll.”
He’d left Mitch Kruger in the kitchen reading the Sun-Times, but when we got there the back door was open and his friend was nowhere in sight. A plate of fried eggs, cold grease glistening on them, sat in front of the newspaper. Kruger had apparently eaten a few bites before something made him decide to take a hike.
“He has got problems, hasn’t he?” I said affably. Mr. Contreras’s generous mouth set in a hard line. “I told him a hunnert times he can’t go off and leave the door open. This ain’t some high-priced suburb where the people coming in your back door are the same ones you’d invite in through the front if you thought of it.”
He stomped over to bolt the door, then opened it wide. “There you are, Kruger. I went and got my neighbor, see if she could understand what you’re driving at. She’s a detective, like I told you—Vic Warshawski. All you had to do was sit on your butt and eat your eggs and wait for her. That too much to ask?”
Kruger smiled fuzzily. It was obvious that he’d walked down to Frankie’s Shortstop Inn on the corner for a few quick ones. By the smell it was bourbon, but it could’ve been rye.
“Told you to mind your own business, Sal,” Mitch mumbled. It took me a moment to remember that my neighbor’s first name was Salvatore.
“Don’t want any detectives butting their noses into my affairs. No offense to you”—Kruger nodded at me—“but detectives mean cops and cops mean union busting.”
“If it ain’t just like you to get so stewed you can’t think straight.” Mr. Contreras was harassed. “First you clean me out of grappa, and if that wasn’t bad enough you got to get pie-eyed first thing in the morning. She ain’t a cop. You know her—we helped her out a couple years back, took on them thugs outside the doc’s clinic. You remember.”
Kruger smiled happily. “Oh, that was a good one, all right. Last good fight I was in. You need some more help, young lady? That why you’re here?”
I eyed him narrowly: he wasn’t as drunk as he wanted me to think. If he’d cleaned Mr. Contreras out of grappa and was strong enough to go out for a few shots, he had a granite head, anyway.
“Now, look here, Mitch. You went on all last night about how you was going to stick it to the bosses, make them see reason, although what about I can’t quite figure. Seems to me we got some pretty good deals, even if we did have to fight every step of the way to win them.”
He turned to me. “I’m sorry, doll. Sorry to drag you out of bed just to see Kruger act like a prize turkey waiting for them to announce the Thanksgiving executions.”
Kruger bristled at that. “I’m no turkey, Sal. You better believe I know what I’m talking about. And if you think we got some good deals you’re just being a scab and a stooge. What kind of benefits do guys get now? They have to negotiate pay cuts just to keep their jobs, while the bosses drive Japanese cars and laugh ‘cause they’re doing all they can to take more jobs away from more Americans. All I’m saying is I can put a stop to that bullshit. You want to grudge me your liquor, fine, but I’ll get you Martell and Courvoisier, you won’t have to drink that turpentine you swill no more.”
“That ain’t turpentine,” Mr. Contreras snapped. “It’s what my daddy drank and my granddaddy before him.”
Kruger winked at me. “Yeah, and look what happened to them. Both dead, ain’t they? Now, there’s no need to bother the young lady, Sal. I know what I know and there isn’t anything for her to investigate, or whatever you want her to do. But see here, Vic,” he added, “you need any help in a fight, you just let me know. Been a long time since I had as much fun as I did that day Sal and I came out to help you and your doctor friend.”
Definitely not as drunk as he wanted us to believe if he could snatch my name out of Mr. Contreras’s diatribe and hang on to it.
“I don’t think I’m needed here,” I told my neighbor, interupting a catalog of the occasions on which Mitch Kruger had been wrong. These ranged from Kruger’s belief that he could drink Mr. Contreras under the table on his—Mr. Contreras’s—fiftieth birthday, and the disaster that occurred when he—Kruger—failed to do so, to Kruger’s mistake in backing Betty-by-Golly against Ragged Rose at Hawthorne in 1975.