Free Target Lancer by Max Allan Collins

anyway. “That’s two tickets, you will note. In case you should wanna bring somebody with.”
    “Who sent these?”
    “Didn’t I say? That’s completely my fault. Those are box seats, Mr. Heller. You’ll be joining the boss with his compliments.”
    I winced and said, “Don’t tell me…”
    But, right before he put his hands down and slipped by me with a jaunty little salute, he did.
    “Mr. Hoffa looks forward to seein’ you there.”

 
    CHAPTER 5
    Sunday, October 27, 1963
    Late morning at Wrigley Field, sunny but cool with typical gusts off the lake, made for perfect football weather—about sixty degrees, pleasantly crisp, just right for light jackets. But with a noon game, you saw plenty of guys salted around the stands in ties and suits or sport coats, having come directly from church. And everybody, including me, wore a hat.
    Everybody but our host, who wore his butch haircut like a badge of honor.
    Jimmy Hoffa’s box seat worth of questionable cronies—with a row of their overdressed, overly made-up wives at the back of the metal railed-off area—had not come from church. Neither had my date and I.
    Her dark-blonde hair up and in curls, Helen was in a navy-blue dress with a white Peter Pan collar with cameo brooch, looking more like a particularly demure sorority sister than the world’s most famous fan dancer. I was in a collarless gray McGregor woolen jacket, zipped to my throat, looking like a priest in some very modern, nonexistent sect.
    About a dozen of us were snugged into these box seats, which did not belong to the Teamsters, exactly—they were courtesy of attorney Allen Dorfman’s insurance agency, which handled the union’s pension fund. A slim, solemn, hawkish-looking guy with Groucho eyebrows, Dorfman was the son of Red Dorfman (not present), a longtime Outfit crony currently playing on Giancana’s team.
    Red’s son Allen was one of the few of this little group in a sport coat, but without tie, shirt open, if button-down. Most of the rest were in heavy jackets and caps, attire you might unload a truck in. But for the cap, the same was true of Hoffa, his coat a lumberjack red-and-black plaid.
    Maybe that was image. Hoffa was an everyman by nature and inclination, and anybody stopping by the box to say hello and wave—whether calling him a respectful “Mr. Hoffa” or a too-familiar “Jimmy”—got a smile and a wave back.
    People were always surprised by Hoffa—by his size, which despite his broad-shouldered brawn added up only to five feet five and maybe 150 pounds; but also by his friendliness, since TV watchers had often seen him mad, like when he battled reporters or alternately smirked and snarled at Bobby Kennedy in that famous rackets committee hearing.
    Hoffa, who was about fifty, was sitting next to me. He’d been happy to meet Helen (“Sally Rand! You was my first crush!”) before she got shuttled to the back row with the wives. Around us was an array of lawyers and thieves—with considerable crossover—including not just Dorfman but heavy-set, bespectacled, respectable-looking attorney William Bufalino, a master at telling Jim what he wanted to hear; and fat, frog-like Joey Glimco, a scowling Outfit killer turned labor leader. None of them spoke to me, though Dorfman nodded.
    Absent was Hoffa’s menacing three-hundred-plus-pound bodyguard, Barney Baker, convicted extortionist, the terms of whose parole prevented participation in anything union-related. Apparently including football games.
    “So whaddya think of these seats?” Hoffa asked.
    His grin was hard to read. Funny thing about that vaguely Oriental mug of his—the features were those of a roughneck, all right, but there was a pixie sparkle to his eyes and his smile.
    I did not play yes-man to Jim, unless it really mattered. If my livelihood, say, or maybe my life wasn’t on the line, I played the role of trusted truth sayer.
    So I said, “Well, they stink, Jim. If this was the Cubs playing, we’d be