Close Call (4 page)
Tony Rourke, office manager at Shamrock Off-Course Wagering headquarters in the Dublin suburb of Dun Laoghaire, brought the Wednesday mail into his boss’ office. He said to Niall Hanratty, “Letter from the States for you. There, on top.” Hanratty thanked him as Rourke turned to leave. He reached for the thick envelope, noting the Chicago return address under the name of Arthur P. Riley, Esq.
Hanratty pushed aside the pile of betting account printouts he had been reviewing. He opened the envelope and read:
“Dear Mr. Hanratty,
“I am writing to offer my sincere condolences for your loss of your Uncle Jim Joyce, a dear, dear friend of mine. Be assured that numerous Masses will be offered on his behalf.
“I feel an obligation to inform you of some specifics regarding your Uncle’s will and they may prove to be of great benefit to you. I realize that, so far removed from the Chicago scene while in your beautiful native land, you may not be aware of some of that document’s ramifications. Please feel free to call me at the following number at any time. I believe I have information that you will find to be very, very valuable.
“Wishing you all the best, I am…”
The letter was signed Arthur P. Riley. The letterhead bore an address on South LaSalle Street in Chicago. Hanratty tossed it back on the desk, a frown on his darkly handsome face. He had received a copy of his Uncle Jim’s will the previous week and been surprised to find himself named a beneficiary since he had never met his mother’s brother in all of his thirty-eight years. Heard much about him, of course, and received a Christmas gift check every year since he was a boy, but never once a meeting. The fact that he’d been left forty-nine percent of an American racetrack called Monee Park had stunned him. Niall had learned of his uncle’s death in a phone call from his cousin Celia. Days later he’d received from Celia, who was the executor of their uncle’s estate, a copy of the will. Hanratty had no way of estimating the value of this bequest out of the blue, though Celia, in an accompanying letter, wrote that she would be forwarding to him “all the relevant financial details regarding our shared inheritance.” He had yet to receive that letter. Maybe lawyer Riley could be of some help in that area.
Hanratty rose and stretched his lean, lanky frame, long arms in his blue Oxford shirt reaching toward the sound-proofed ceiling of the large office. He loosened his red tie before sitting back down in his desk chair and reaching for the phone. “Riley,” he said aloud. “Now, here’s one that’s popped out of the rat hole, his nose twitching. Or maybe he’s just one of those American super Micks, the Irish wannebes, patronizing us while they praise us.” He smiled wryly. “Can’t hurt to find out what’s up this rascal’s sleeve.” He calculated the time difference, Ireland was six hours ahead of Chicago, and decided to wait until late afternoon to make his call.
***
Riley picked up on the first ring.
Must be a small law practice if your
man’s answering his own phone
, Niall thought. He said, “Mr. Riley? This is Niall Hanratty, calling from Ireland.”
“Mr. Hanratty, how good to talk to you. I take it you’ve received my letter about Jim Joyce. Now one with the dust,” Riley added dramatically. “Passed away in his sleep, you know, peaceful as a Meadow in Meath.”
Hanratty, rolling his eyes at this bit of blather, said, “That’s a comfort, to be sure. Now, Mr. Riley, about your letter, and my uncle’s will. What ‘great benefits’ are you referring to?” Riley cleared his throat. Hanratty sat back in his chair. He’d never known a barrister who’d gotten anywhere near the point in the first furlong or so, and he doubted the American would be any different.
After describing in detail his great admiration for Jim Joyce, and a snide comment or two about cousin Celia’s business acumen, Riley finally arrived at the point, saying, “I believe there’s money to be made from that racetrack that you, perhaps, have not been apprised of.”
“Go on, man.”
Riley assumed, he said, that Hanratty had been informed of Monee Park’s current “dismal financial condition. It’s an old dump, getting dumpier. There’s no money for badly needed capital improvements. What your cousin Celia is pinning her hopes on is a bill in our state legislature that would legalize a Chicago casino. To lessen the effect of damaging competition to existing racetracks, the thinking is to give the Illinois racetracks the right to put video slot machines on their properties.”
Hanratty said, “Besides Monee Park, what other tracks are near Chicago?”
“The big one is Heartland Downs, out north and west of the city,” Riley said. “It’ll survive with or without video slots. Then there are three smaller harness racing tracks. Two of those, like Monee Park, could surely use the revenue from slot machines.”
“What are the chances of this bill passing?”
Riley paused. “Perhaps fifty-fifty at this point,” he said. “The state is desperately in need of new revenues, and casinos are guaranteed to produce them. Look at the states that have legalized them in recent years. Huge financial successes for the casino owners, the state, the taxpayers.”
“Not so much for the gambling addicts, I presume,” Hanratty interjected.
“True, true Mr. Hanratty. You being in the gaming business yourself over there, I’m sure you’re well aware of that problem plaguing a tiny minority.”
“When might such a law be passed? And go into effect?”
“Ah,” Riley said, “this state being what it is, which is quite conservative on gambling issues, a bill such as this would only have a chance in a non-election year, which this is. That’s when the boys down there in Springfield get brave, churning out laws they hope nobody will hold them responsible for when they run for office next time.
“The timing, then,” Riley continued, “is favorable for such a bill. But that in itself doesn’t guarantee its passage, not by any means. There’s a very conservative faction in the House that’s staunchly against any expansion of gambling. The bill’s sponsors are going to have to clear that hurdle.” He chuckled at his reference to racing.
Hanratty groaned softly, wondering how much faith to put in the opinions of this long distance opportunist.
“Assume the thing passes, Mr. Riley. How long before the video slots are up and running then?”
“At least a year from now,” Riley estimated, “before any new money could come flooding into old Monee Park.”
Without elaborating, Hanratty said, “Well, that’s not ideal by any means, as far as I’m concerned.” He was not inclined to inform Riley that he was planning a major expansion of Shamrock Off-Course Betting Corp., both its Irish operation as well as creating two offices in Spain, one in Portugal. He had been laying the groundwork for this project for three years. Getting it off the ground would require some major borrowing as well as a significant infusion of his own cash. The news of Uncle Jim’s will had encouraged Niall to think that new money would be available relatively soon. Now, according to Riley, that would not be the case.
“I’m damned sorry to hear that,” Hanratty said softly. “I was under the impression that the disbursement would be much sooner.”
Riley laughed, then caught himself. “Oh, disburse they may well do,” he said. “Except for the fact that there’s nothing to disburse at this particular point.”
Hanratty sat back in his chair, mulling this over. He’d always tended to sift carefully through information even before the time when, as a young clerk in a down country off-track betting shop, eager to learn the bookmaking business, he’d made a huge score wagering on a longshot winner of England’s Grand National Steeplechase. He’d used the winnings to buy the small shop in which he worked. Its aging owner, eager to sell and retire, had offered advice as he signed over the papers. “This is a beautiful, ould, steady business, Niall. If you don’t get adventurous, or caught up in the booze or the cooz, you can’t fookin’ lose.”
A tireless, ambitious man, Hanratty in subsequent years had expanded his holdings by opening shops in locations other bookmaking firms had avoided, or sometimes using the power of slightly veiled threats to help in the purchase of existing independent shops. There had been murmured complaints about his methods of acquisition. None hindered the growth of his thriving company. “That Hanratty, he’s a hard man entirely,” was whispered about him.
Niall said to Riley, “Can you tell me this, man: why are you so interested in this matter if there’s no immediate return in sight?”
Riley chuckled, then began talking so softly Hanratty strained to hear him. “Your cousin Celia is a very determined person,” Riley said. “She’s got her heart set on keeping Monee Park going until the video slots relief arrives. But,” he continued, voice even softer now, “it’s quite possible she could be convinced to recognize the advantage of selling the land now. Reaping immediate profits. Profits that you, of course, would be receiving almost half of. This could conceivably happen within the next few months.”
“How is it, Mr. Riley, that you know all these details about Uncle Jim’s will?”
“Why, because my former partner Frank Foley wrote the will years ago. He and Jim were high school classmates.”
Tony Rourke peeked his head into the office. Hanratty put his hand over the phone, and said, “Tony, be a good man now and run down to that new Starbucks and get us a couple of expensive coffees.” He winked. Rourke smiled and went back out the office door.
“I take it, Mr. Riley,” Hanratty said, “that you yourself would be in charge of whatever persuading that needs to be done over there.”
Riley said, “That could certainly be arranged. Your cousin is a charming, smart, and very stubborn woman. She’ll not just be talked off her current stance. She’ll need some convincing. I’ve given this a great deal of thought, and I’m confident the plans I’ve made will get her to see the light. If you get my drift.”
“Yes, counselor, I’m getting your drift. About what might that drift cost me?”
“Fifteen percent of the sale price of Monee Park,” Riley shot back.
Hanratty hesitated, then said, “I’ll give you ten percent of my net, Mr. Riley. And that’s that. And I don’t want anymore phone calls regarding your fee. My word is good. I’ll be tracking your progress.
“Go on with it then, man,” Hanratty said, and hung up.
Thousands of mile away, Riley smiled as he put his phone down. Born and raised in the working class Chicago neighborhood called Canaryville, he still had strong ties there even though he’d married a woman from Winnetka and had lived in that northern suburb for years. He and his wife had seven children, four of them already in college. Riley was straining to finance their educations, and this with another three to go. He’d always kept his eye out for the main chance, and in the Monee Park situation he believed he’d found it.
Although he’d moved fifteen miles and a world away from Canaryville, Riley was remembered there, both envied and respected for his departure from the insular old neighborhood where families had known each other and intermarried for generations. He knew who to call if he wanted to tap into the small talent pool of toughs always ready to create mayhem, whether they were paid for it or not.
Had Hanratty pressed him for details, Riley would have described the two young men he was now planning to contact: “Brutal bastards who don’t like people, or working, but love money, especially if they’ve stolen it. They’re tougher than your granddad’s toenails,” he’d have said, with a satisfied smile.
Aiden Lucarelli walked out of Ogden’s Funeral Home first, a step or two in advance of Denny Shannon. From a distance the two of them, each a blocky five-foot six, wearing jackets with tavern softball team names on the back, looked almost identical. Up close, not so. Lucarelli’s dark eyes were widely spaced, his complexion carrying a Mediterranean tinge. He wore his black hair slicked back and sported one of the trimmed goatee/mustache combinations favored by many Major League baseball pitchers.
Shannon’s skin was the color of printer paper, his closely set light blue eyes almost slits above cheek bones that stuck out like little shelves. The two of them walked with the thigh-bulging strides of the steroid-using amateur weight lifters they were, their black half boots clicking on the pavement. They were twenty-six years old, first cousins, and best friends since first grade at Holy Rosary parochial school in Canaryville. It was at Holy Rosary that they’d early on became known as “vicious little shits,” a reputation they’d done nothing to diminish in the two decades since.
Unlike many of their fellow Canaryville residents, Lucarelli and Shannon had not been granted prized employment in the City of Chicago’s Department of Streets and Sanitation, notorious for its paternalism and phantom payrollers, while at the same time home to thousands of hard working citizens. “Streets and San” was replete with patronage sponsored Canaryville men, but Shannon and Lucarelli had been blackballed by the local political powers who deemed them to be too dangerous.
The cousins worked during Chicago’s warm months on road construction crews. Laid off the rest of the year, they collected unemployment and indulged in pastimes that suited their personalities: house breaking and burglary in some of the ritzy Chicago suburbs, some strong arm work for a local bookie, visits to Rush Street bars where they frequently amused themselves harassing other patrons. They had been permanently barred from three such saloons thus far. The girls they’d occasionally managed to pick up in the bars and take to a nearby motel were usually naive tourists visiting the city.
Of the two, Shannon had the most severe case of class envy directed toward the well-dressed, college educated young people populating these bars and restaurants. He loved walking down the sidewalk behind women who were talking on their cell phones, brushing them with his shoulder, saying, “Let me talk to him when you’re done.” He had Lucarelli laughing so hard he had to hang on to a parking meter the time Shannon shouted at a startled female pedestrian whose angry phone conversation he’d interrupted, “That’s right, give it to the bastard. I wouldn’t take that from him, either.” The woman had first regarded Shannon with astonishment. Getting an even closer look at this grinning goof who pressing his face closer to hers, his beer breath blasting, she paled and dropped her cell phone. Shannon kicked it onto Division Street before he and Lucarelli strutted away.
A few steps outside the funeral home, Lucarelli stopped to light a Marlboro. “I hate those fucking places,” he said. As he waved the flame off his match, the night sky exploded six blocks to their north. “Hey, one of the Sox hit one out,” Denny Shannon said, smiling, fist in the air. “Old Fuzzy would have liked that, man.”
“Maybe he’ll sit up in his damned chair in there,” Lucarelli replied bitterly. They walked to Lucarelli’s nine-year-old faded blue Taurus that sat in the middle of the small, crowded Ogden’s Funeral Home parking lot. Shannon said, “Fuck’s the matter with you?” Lucarelli waited until they were in the car before answering.
“The scene in there, in Ogden’s. Too fuckin’ weird for me, man. I hated it.” Lucarelli slammed his door shut and turned on the ignition. The old motor roared to life and he pressed down hard on the accelerator as he drove north on Parnell.
Shannon sat back in the passenger seat and lighted a Pall Mall. “It didn’t bother me none,” he said. “I heard they wouldn’t let the family set Fuzzy up like that over by McIlhenny’s,” the neighborhood’s major funeral home. “That’s why they sent him over here to Ogden’s. It’s new, Ogden’s, they’re looking for business.”
The viewing they had just left was that of Howard “Fuzzy” Fitzpatrick whose liver, under heavy alcohol attack since his high school days, had finally given out on him at age fifty-seven. A lifelong White Sox fanatic, Fuzzy had celebrated in earnest the previous October when the team won its first World Series since 1917. His celebrating continued almost unabated into the following year, such dedicated drinking resulting in an even earlier death than had been anticipated by Fuzzy’s family, friends, and neighbors.
At his request, Fuzzy’s remains had been dressed in his regular jeans and a black 2005 Champion Chicago White Sox jersey, then placed in his favorite arm chair, hauled from the basement of his bungalow to Ogden’s by dedicated fellow fans. A White Sox cap sat atop Fuzzy’s head. A can of Bud Light had been taped into his left hand, a Kool affixed between rigid fingers of his right. It looked, at first glance in the funeral home, that Fuzzy could be sleeping in his basement rec room facing his wide screen TV, his head back in the chair as if, like thousands of nights in the past, he had merely passed out, not away. Mourners were taken aback when they entered the viewing room and observed this sight.
“Freaks,” Lucarelli said.
“Who you talkin’ about?”
“Fuzzy. Him and his crazy family that would go for a set up like that in there. The people in there gawking at him. All freaks.”
Lucarelli drove on in angry silence. Shannon didn’t look at him, knowing that a terrible temper eruption might be sitting precariously on his volatile cousin’s emotional cusp. It was funny, Shannon sometimes thought, how alike they were, but also how different. Shannon’s mom, Molly McIlhenny, was the most placid, even-tempered woman he knew—except for her sister, Bridgett, Aiden’s mother. But whereas the normally laid back Shannon took after his mother’s side, Aiden had inherited his close to the surface boiling point from his late father, Jimmy Lucarelli, the low level Outfit guy Bridgett McIlhenny had married much against the wishes of both sets of parents. Neighborhood people still remembered the brouhaha over Bridgett insisting on giving their only child an Irish name, Jimmy Lucarelli angrily conceding to his wife’s demand, then charging outside their basement flat and destroying her car with a sledgehammer.
Shannon finally broke the silence, saying “Didn’t get a chance to tell you before at Ogden’s, but I got a call from Art Riley this afternoon.” No response. Shannon, himself starting to get a little wound up now, said, “So, you want to hear about it or not?”
“I’m not sure,” Lucarelli said, gunning through a red light at Roosevelt Road, thinking about Riley, the lawyer who had represented them in the past, the man he always referred to as Art the Fart because of a gaseous incident one afternoon in the courthouse at Twenty-sixth and California, the product of Riley’s hastily consumed beer and burrito lunch across the street. The expulsion had seen Riley’s fellow passengers flatten themselves against the three gray elevator walls en route to floor five.
Shannon said, “Didn’t he get us off every fuckin’ time? Put us on to some of our biggest scores to get the money to pay him? Am I right or am I right?”
Aiden couldn’t argue with that. He and Denny had been arrested dozens of times but charged just twice, resulting in a lone assault conviction and suspended sentence for Shannon. The other assaults and the mixed bag of burglary raps they’d beaten, frequently aided by “Canaryville amnesia,” a condition that overtook witnesses who lived only a few perilous blocks removed from the accused, and found themselves the targets of seriously believable threats prior to the scheduled start of trials.
Riley had been their lawyer each time and, being from the neighborhood, was an old hand at such matters. Once he’d gotten to know Aiden and Denny, Riley had been able to steer some work their way, muscle jobs involving tardy debtors in need of motivation to satisfy their obligations. Riley knew the cousins to be eager for such work. Providing these two chunky brutes with such opportunities was like waving a lamb shank in front of a pit bull.
“So, tell me what Riley wanted,” Lucarelli said.