Free Boystown 7: Bloodlines by marshall thornton Page A

you know if you actually come down and complain to your Alderman about potholes they fix them? We got this pothole so deep you can see the cobblestone down underneath it.”
    One of them said, “No kidding.”  
    “It works better to come down. If you just call or write a letter they only fix it half the time. Showing up it’s a hundred percent. Guess they’re afraid you’ll come back.”
    The door opened and we were at the twenty-second floor. I got off and looked around as though I was actually trying to find my Alderman’s office. The door closed behind me and I stopped. I decided I needed to wait at least ten minutes before I went down to the lobby. If the agents were at all suspicious they’d wait down there to see how long I took. There was an ashtray on the wall between the elevator banks; I lit up a cigarette and considered my situation. I needed to know who was coming in and out of the task force’s offices. It was the best way to determine who their informant was. But there was no easy way to set up surveillance. There was no hard way that I could see either.
      By the time I finished my cigarette I decided to head back to my office and go through the boxes again. There had to be something in there that would lead me to the informant. But even as I rode the elevator down and walked back across the lobby and out to the subway, I began to wonder if there wasn’t another way to approach this.  
    I went back over the basics. Shady and Josette Perelli had been murdered, or rather, hit. Murder is a word that implies some level of passion. They were hit. Taken out of existence for purely business reasons. According to Prince Charles, a soldier named Nino “The Nose” Nitti killed the couple on Jimmy’s orders. Nitti died seven years after the Perellis in 1979. He was shanked in a prison shower. He was about to be paroled, early and somewhat suspiciously. What Nitti was in prison for was not mentioned in the files. I had no idea if it was relevant.
    The El train’s doors opened and let me out at the Belmont stop. I’d been riding in one of the old green cars with the stiff leather seats. One of the windows didn’t close all the way so it had been a chilly ride. Still, I liked that it had kept me awake and thinking. It seemed like a good idea to find someone who knew The Nose. I sat down on one of the wooden benches that dot the platform. I was trying to decide if I should cross over to the other side of the platform and head back to the library and do some research on The Nose. There had to be newspaper stories about him. His arrests. His death. What I needed were relatives. A wife. Kids. Someone he might have confessed to. They wouldn’t be in the articles necessarily, but his address would. It would give me a place to start. I decided I’d start there in the morning. I didn’t feel like trekking back downtown.  
    I walked down the wooden stairs into the station, which had to be seventy or eighty years old and looked every day of it. The electric blue paint was thick and heavily chipped. The wooden steps sagged in the middle where foot traffic had worn them down. The ticket taker’s booth, only a bit bigger than a phone booth, was original, but the silver turnstiles were not. In fact, much of the station probably was not. I imagined the wood being replaced over and over again as the weather and millions of feet wore it down. I went through the tall turnstile that led to the street.  
    In front of the station, a woman in a white uniform held a plastic bucket collecting coins as people walked by. I wasn’t sure if she was Salvation Army or not. They usually only came out at Christmas. But it was nearly Easter, maybe that’s why they were reappearing. I started down Belmont toward Clark, but then I stopped and turned to look at the woman again. She’d given me an idea, an idea that might actually work.

Chapter Seven

    I was hungry when I walked into my office. I wondered if I should buy one of those