Kruger bristled at that. “I’m no turkey, Sal. You better believe I know what I’m talking about. And if you think we got some good deals you’re just being a scab and a stooge. What kind of benefits do guys get now? They have to negotiate pay cuts just to keep their jobs, while the bosses drive Japanese cars and laugh ’cause they’re doing all they can to take more jobs away from more Americans. All I’m saying is I can put a stop to that bullshit. You want to grudge me your liquor, fine, but I’ll get you Martell and Courvoisier, you won’t have to drink that turpentine you swill no more.”

“That ain’t turpentine,” Mr. Contreras snapped. “It’s what my daddy drank and my granddaddy before him.”

Kruger winked at me. “Yeah, and look what happened to them. Both dead, ain’t they? Now, there’s no need to bother the young lady, Sal. I know what I know and there isn’t anything for her to investigate, or whatever you want her to do. But see here, Vic,” he added, “you need any help in a fight, you just let me know. Been a long time since I had as much fun as I did that day Sal and I came out to help you and your doctor friend.”

Definitely not as drunk as he wanted us to believe if he could snatch my name out of Mr. Contreras’s diatribe and hang on to it.

“I don’t think I’m needed here,” I told my neighbor, interrupting a catalog of the occasions on which Mitch Kruger had been wrong. These ranged from Kruger’s belief that he could drink Mr. Contreras under the table on his—Mr. Contreras’s—fiftieth birthday, and the disaster that occurred when he—Kruger—failed to do so, to Kruger’s mistake in backing Betty-by-Golly against Ragged Rose at Hawthorne in 1975.

Mr. Contreras switched his frown to me but didn’t try to stop me when I walked out the back door to go up to my own kitchen. As I made some fresh coffee I thought briefly about Kruger. I couldn’t get myself excited about his broad hints of malfeasance at Diamond Head. He’d been mooching around hoping for some kind of handout and would be too ashamed to admit that. If they gave him a brush-off he would exaggerate his grievance with a drunk’s paranoia, talking about a revenge that would never materialize.

Maybe someone at Diamond Head was siphoning off inventory, or tools—it wouldn’t be the only plant in Chicago where that happened. But if he thought he could blackmail them into cutting him in on some penny-ante deal, it was just typical drunken mush. And it was more likely that he’d imagined the whole thing.

5

Just a Neighborhood Lynch Mob