Page 2 of Shadow Ticket

“That rig,” Skeet looking forlorn, “got him out of so many bad situations…Called it his li’l tramp freighter of the streets and in the end a blown-up wreck with zero resale value.”

“Getting sentimental, kid, better watch ’at, once.”

Boynt meanwhile, having run his usual unsociable O-O of Skeet, “Recall there’s a Depression on, we can only afford so much pro bono work anymore, there was a memo, I handed you it myself.

” Taking the runaway cheez heiress file, tapping Hicks gently on the head with it, handing it over and stepping back into his office.

“Soon as you’ve had a look through this, Hicks, let me know what you think.

” Doesn’t quite slam the door, but there is some emphasis to the way it shuts.

“Was that steam comin out his ears? Did I barge in on somethin again?”

“Nothin that can’t wait. New watch, I see.”

“Hamilton, glows in the dark too.”

“Pretty classy there, Skeet.”

“Can’t help it, she just thinks I’m cute. Her way of showing it.”

“Uh-huh.” As likely lifted off somebody staggering out of a speak, but with Skeet you never know, so Hicks only makes with the avuncular beaming.

Skeet is one of the modern young breed of dip, no longer interested in the pocket watches of the old and inattentive, finding more challenge in lifting a watch right off of a wrist in broad daylight, where any trick buckle or extra keeper can slow you down by some fatal splinter of a second.

Skeet lights up a cigar stub that never seems to change length much, the very blackest of Italo fumigators, dense as a rock, goes out if you don’t keep puffing on it so after a while you let it go out, but keep it in your kisser anyway.

“OK, how do we approach this?” coming out of somewhere with a snub nose service .32, and pretending to check to see if it’s loaded.

“Gosh sakes, Skeet.”

“Kids’ Special.”

“You’ve been firing this thing much?”

“Only out at the dump so far. But keep your shirt on, one of these days you’ll be readin all about it on the front page of the Journal.”

Hicks used to talk like this back in high school. For a minute and a half he’s taking a bounce back in time, and looking at himself as a kid.

“OK, OK now, Skeet, now about this bomb, what’d be your guess?”

“There was some talk of a Third Ward type of person.”

“Uh-uh.” Out with the cautionary finger.

“Still want to be a detective when you grow up, first thing to learn is keep an open mind. Maybe for the MPD and them, bomb always equals Italian no matter what, but in real life there’s bomb rollers in all parts of town, even among the German and Polish races.

Now what about money, social life, how much does Stuffy owe and who to and is he carryin on with some big shot’s sweetie. ”

“Love life among the grown-ups, better ask a newsie, you really want to know. Those guys are the ones that get around.”

Though Skeet doesn’t read the papers much, he manages to follow gang wars like some kids follow pennant races, carrying in his wallet a photo of Al Capone, clipped from the Journal, across which Skeet, or somebody, has inscribed, “To my old goombah Skeet, who taught me everything I know, regards and tanti auguri, always, Al.”

Mostly his news of current events comes from keeping an ear aimed at the radio and staying in everyday touch with the kid underworld—drifters, truants, and guttersnipes, newsboys at every corner and streetcar stop—who in turn have antennas of their own out.

“It’s like Mussolini,” Skeet explains, “the little ones report to bigger kids, who report to me, then I report to you, then on up the pyramid.”

“And…the Mussolini here again being who, Pete Guardalabene?”

“You know better. Pete is no more’n mid-level, same for Joe Vallone—both bein run like everybody else in this burg by remote control from Chicago.”

Hicks and Skeet go back a couple years, to one of those spells of bank robberies and pineapple detonations that now and then would sweep through town, leaving civilian nervous wreckage in its wake.

Hicks had put his nose into a recently stuck up bank on Wisconsin Avenue on behalf of a client whose bank account had just disappeared, either in the robbery or into some soon to be ex-spousal pocketbook.

Before he can find somebody to talk to there’s a sudden loud bang and people are running in all directions, screaming “They’re here again” and “Run for your life” and so forth.

Hicks moves into a corner of the floor plan not likely to be run around in much and waits.

No Sicilians waving sawed-offs, no smell of burned powder, no fire brigades or bloody casualties in the picture.

Check and double check…he waits. Soon from behind an artificial palm tree emerges a small though energetic urchin with a pocketful of rubber balloons and a supply of pins.

As Hicks watches, he stealthily blows up a balloon, ties the neck off, scans around for likely targets, notices Hicks has been watching him.

“Uh-oh.”

“Things in this town not jittery enough for you?”

“Don’t turn me in, mister, I’m only a kid.”

“Sure you are, you’re kiddin me right now, go on, get outa here.”

“You just saved me,” adds the kid, “from industrial school, Green Bay, maybe worse.”

“You still here? Go on, vamoose.”

“You may not pay everything you owe, but some of us do.”

Since then Skeet has just kept showing up out of the city mobility, quiet, unannounced, slowly to be revealed as a would-be apprentice with all the desire, maybe even some of the chops already, but still no idea what could be waiting just over the next doorsill, who thinks he wants, heaven help him, to be a detective someday.

Not, he’s quick to point out, a common field op like Hicks, “More of a class act, like Sherlock Holmes and them.”

“There you go.”

“If it’s not professional,” Skeet figures now, “this truck bomb, it must be amateur?”

“Amateur, frankly,” Hicks shrugging, “ain’t nearly as much fun, short money, doubtful tomato quality, too much work, too little of a return—”

“Yeah, but aside from that…”

“You always need to go for the big time, kid, every time—ya listenin to me? Glamour! high rolling, high explosives, high danger level—”

“You’re some hell of a guide through the minefields of youth, Hicksie.”

Far as he knows, Skeet was one of those Christmas babies left in a straw box for the MPD to find.

There were a number of these cop shelters all over Milwaukee where a beat-pounder could step in out of the cold weather for a minute or two—any longer than that, you were apt to be jolted awake by some phone dispatcher whose idea of fun is sneaking upside your head in the middle of the night and banging on a gong.

The little shacks had hay all over the floor to keep those flat feet warm and door-kicking-ready, reminding people so much of the manger in Bethlehem that when the Depression struck in earnest it became a practice at Christmas for desperate parents to leave babies not only at church doorsteps but also in these MPD straw boxes, with hay all piled around.

A Christmas crèche with beat coppers standing in for the animals.

Skeet came to learn about outdoor city light and how much and how little to expect from it in the way of comfort—plate glass window reflections, penumbras of lampposts at the ends of trolley lines to the edges of suburbs still officially to be named—haunting given stretches of sidewalk just as the shops close down and the girls come out dazy and chattering, cigarette smoke and perfume in the slowly more intensifying light of the evening street, immersed too deep in lives that Skeet could never quite see any plausible way to step into…

A Milwaukee bildungsroman, as they call it locally.

Skeet was to bounce his way through a string of his mother’s domestic arrangements, motherly enough instincts but little to no judgment in the matter of boyfriend material, with unintended consequences few of which worked out well, though there were exceptions.

“What’s that smell? Like rubber burning? What’s the oven doing on 375 degrees?”

“I noticed you weren’t hooking into the pocket so good, Knuckles—”

“Tell me it ain’t so.”

“Wanted to get it really clean for you,” Skeet kept trying to explain, as Knuckles yanked open the oven door, revealing through the billows of smoke a reeking and out-of-round ex–bowling ball. “Oh—no, what’d I do?”

Which is where a normal Milwaukeean would’ve brought out some pocket revolver and settled things on the spot, confident that no local jury would call it anything but justifiable homicide. Instead Knuckles thought he saw an educational opening.

“First thing anybody learns in this town is never put a bowling ball in any oven over a hundred degrees, what kind of upbringing you been getting anyways?” Jerking his head dramatically at the now unrollable Mineralite blob.

“That used to be a custom ball, cost me 20 smackers, kid, that’s half of what’s left of your childhood settin pins, nickel a game and be thankful this ain’t Cleveland, you’d only get 4￠. ”

So began Skeet’s pinsetting career, which would before long come to be described all over town as “illustrious.” A tough monkey with a number of speeds to his gearbox, Skeet quickly learned his way around a bowling environment unforgiving as any on the planet.

Meantime, Knuckles having bid farewell, presently a new gent appeared who turned out to be not so parentally inclined.

The blissful pair moved up to Shorewood leaving Skeet on his own, and good riddance.

As word spread, Skeet found himself in demand for all-night private sessions, trusted by bowling alley owners to keep order and lock up and even to acquire his own small crew of assistants.

The tips kept rolling in, literally, the practice being to stuff dollar bills into the thumb and finger holes and roll the ball back gently, even respectfully, to the pinboy.

After a while Skeet began betting on kegler outcomes here and out of town and before long this had grown to a sizable sum which Skeet had the good sense to keep out of the stock market and inside a safe-deposit box at Northern Trust.

—

Just as Hicks is rolling a form into the Underwood, Boynt bounces back in to cast a disappointed eye.

“Starting a ticket, I knew it.”

“Pay dirt here,” nonchalantly, “Wait and see.”

“Uh, huh.” Boynt is wearing his You Poor Fish look, which he thinks is motivational, but isn’t.

“You know what happens around here any time our productivity curve even thinks about headin down Illinois way, back office just sends in more of their time-motion snoopers. That what you want? Bifocal lenses everyplace you turn?”

“Relax, Boynt, I’ll keep this all off the swindle sheets…”

“Hicks, I’m a hard case, pity doesn’t come to me easily, but this is pitiful. These clients of yours—living at the edge of desperation, yet always managing to find you, and you know why that is, of course you do, don’t you, Hicks?”

“Prohibition?” Just a guess. Boynt blames everything on Prohibition.

“Because you’re a sap! A Board of Idiots approved and certified sap!—have I mentioned that before, I forget.”

“You mean in so many words?”

“Taken in by every two-bit crybaby comes pissing and moaning in under the door, no intention of ever paying on time, if at all, ’course not, why should anybody worry about overdue notices when they’re only coming from a sap?”

“Does this mean there goes my year-end bonus again?”

“Oh, and by the way, this truck bomb, before you type up your ticket? oddly enough I’m just off the phone with Badger All-Risk Fiduciary Life as well as the local Teutonia Society, and guess what, each of them just hired us to look into that very same incident, each thinking the other did it, and how’s that for peculiar, huh? ”

“See, Boss? What’d I tell you?”

“When was that, I may not’ve been listening.

” Boynt heads for his desk drawer, where if this was Chicago you would expect to find a pint of Old Log Cabin but here in Milwaukee it’s more likely to be Korbel brandy, a bottle of which Boynt now hauls out, looks at thoughtfully a while…

“Nah, too early yet,” and stashes back in the drawer.