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murderers. It gave them too much opportunity for gaining space and headlines in the newspapers. They got a ‘rep’ and then they had to live up to it, again and again. It all fed their fires.
    ‘We checked the hospitals,’ Doc concurred. ‘We had some of our people see how many body parts are being used as compared to the number of surgeries they had on the books. And then we hit our contacts to see if anyone’s doing a side-order business, because you know this guy is not exactly working legit.’
    I grimaced at him and he smiled. 
    ‘We’ll never find anything by asking the hospitals. If they’re getting illegal supplies, there ain’t going to be any paper trail,’ Doc admitted. ‘So who’d know all about a highly illegal activity like black-market body parts?’
    He was grinning at me.
    ‘I find that remark highly racist, Doctor.’
    ‘All you guineas are so godda m sensitiv e .’
    *
    Billy Cheech — William Ciccio — was the cousin of an Outfit guy that Doc and I had launched into Joliet Prison a few years back. Danny Cheech was the Don before he was busted. Busted for having several Loop restaurant-goers gunned to death in a botched attempt to kill some piece of shit Ciccio wanted gone. We finally got him before an IRA assassin got to this Outfit asshole.
    Billy was on the periphery with the Chicago version of the Mafia. He and Danny and I were all distant cousins. Which was nothing my side of th e famili a had ever been too proud of. But I always liked Billy. And my little cousin had always had the bad habit of confiding in me when he thought the outlaw side of the clan had gone over the edge. In other words I had used my own cousin as an informant from time to time. Nothing big. I didn’t want him to get wasted because of his generosity in providing his coz with information that could be harmful to Billy’s health. The days o f omert a — total silence — had gone. Gotti was in the pen and Sammy the Bull had a book out, I heard. There was no Don Corleone ‘honor’ on the streets. There probably never was. These guys did their grannies if the price was right. Honor among thieves and murderers was Hollywood’s version of these wastes of flesh. They had no honor. They were businessmen without a code to do business by. I had never found them romantic or amusing or attractive.
    Billy Cheech was a little simple, and that was why he talked to a cousin he knew was a homicide investigator. All of his associates thought he was goofy, too, but he was related to the one-time big boss, Danny, so they gave the silly kid a little room to be stupid.
    Doc and I ran into him at the garage where he was allowed to change oil. One of his cousins owned the place, of course. He was under the hood of a Jaguar at the moment. This oil place catered to the wealthy, it appeared. There were BMWs and ‘Vettes and a few Lexuses.
    ‘You stealing from the rich now, Robin Hood?’ I asked him.
    He banged his head on the way out from under the car hood.
    ‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ! ... Jimmy! Cousin! And you got the good Doctor with you!’
    Doc had told him twenty times to stop calling him the ‘Good Doctor’. Billy got under Gibron’s hide. I had to drag him with me to visit my second cousin every time I was looking for a little freebie intelligence on the Outfit.
    ‘You wanna oil change for that piece-a-shit fuckin’ Ford?’
    ‘Nah. The Department takes care of the maintenance, Billy ... You got a minute?’
    His jocular mood vanished. He knew why I was here now.
    ‘You wanna get some lunch, Jimmy? Doc? It is that time of the day anyhow.’
    Billy excused himself to go wash up after he slammed the hood on that Jaguar that was worth more than my mortgage.
    He was back in a hurry. His hands were still filthy, but it was what I put up with for his freebies.
    We drove to the Garvin Inn in Berwyn. It was a half-hour from his garage, but he was Billy Cheech and nobody was going to bitch about his two-hour lunch break. It