But if that had been the plan, why was Bernice Rogers turning back up in Chicago? Schoemaker figured she’d been out east of late, living rather conspicuously as the mother of a small infant. Were things too hot out there? Was somebody in the gang crumbling under the pressure? Was a double-cross in the works?

I smiled and sat back in the cab and relished the thought of answering some of those questions by busting Bernice Rogers. Savoring the idea of being the cop who single-handedly cracked the Lindbergh case, half a continent away. Not bad for a kid, which is what I was: twenty-six years old and enjoying a relatively easy life in undoubtedly hard times.

As for making the collar itself, I was eager, not apprehensive. I knew molls like Bernice could be dangerous, but on the pickpocket detail, you get physical with crooks every day. Hardly a week went by, I didn’t take a gun off some punk.

And I had a gun of my own under my arm, besides-a nine-millimeter Browning-and was not afraid to use it.

Not that I was trigger-happy. In fact I carried this specific weapon, rather than the usual revolver most cops carry, partly because I preferred automatics, and partly because this was the gun my father shot himself with.

My father, whose bookstore on the West Side had run to radical literature, was an old union guy who hated the idea that I became a cop. He specifically hated it when he found out, or figured out, that some money I’d given him, to renew the lease on his store, was a payoff I got for testifying in the Jake Lingle murder trial.

The cops and Capone had a patsy lined up to take the fall for that killing, and I was the witness that swung it. It was no big deal: the patsy was a willing participant, getting well paid for his prison stay. And my cooperation got me a promotion to plainclothes and an envelope with a grand in it. But my Papa could not understand that I was just trying to get ahead, trying to land a better job, playing by the rules of the Chicago game.