The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  "It's a ham," he said. "Not much point in giving it to the Capones' cook now. Maybe you can share it with your sister and brother-in-law."

  "My brother-in-law's missing in action in Germany." He made no move to take the sack.

  "I'm sorry."

  "I can't accept gratuities."

  "Not for doing your job, which like you said was to see the toll gets paid. Can't a man show his appreciation to a fellow Christian who helped him out?" The man considered. His brain appeared to work slowly, conditioned as it was to accepting bills and coins and making change, not decisions. Vasco began to feel conspicuous standing out in the open holding a bag of meat. He inserted a gentle prod. "It'd be a sin to let it spoil, especially now."

  The toll man nodded abruptly and took the sack. "Thank you kindly, Father. Betty'll appreciate it, with a fifteen-year-old to feed. Mind if I tell her it came from a minister instead of a priest? She belongs to the Eastern Star."

  "Tell her whatever you like." He hesitated. "I'd like to pray for your brother-in-law. May I ask his name?"

  Shorter period of consideration. "Fred Norris, Airman First Class. He was—is—a tail gunner on a B-17. That's the duty Clark Gable volunteered for, after Carole Lombard was killed in that plane crash. Most movie stars, they do USC, or clerical work stateside; the War Department tries to keep 'em alive. But you know what they say about tail gunners? Pilot lands at an airfield, says, 'Gimme five hundred gallons and a new tail gunner.' Gable? He wants to commit suicide. So I ask you, what's a husband and father want with that duty? Sure, pray for him, but pray for Fred, Junior, while you're at it. Them recruiters don't look too hard at what they write under Date of Birth."

  "My father thinks the war will be over by Christmas."

  "That's what they said about Prohibition back in 1920."

  "I'll pray for them both."

  "Beg pardon, Father, and not to speak ill of absent parties, but Fred always was a pain in the ass. That's the job description for in-laws. I'd never tell Betty, but you made the right choice in life."

  He started the car. Not much had changed since Chicago, despite the evidence of Repeal and economic recovery and world war. The man guarding a shipment of contraband animal flesh might have received his training riding in the back of a beer truck.

  This time the freckle-faced guard at the gate didn't pat him down for weapons. He smiled, adding cordiality to politeness, and swung both portals wide. Vasco parked behind a string of sport roadsters and sedans trimmed with gleaming nickel in the turnaround before the front door. The sun felt hot on his back when he got out; a liveried chauffeur scrubbed at fresh gull-splatter on a fender with a chamois cloth, taking care not to touch the blistering metal with bare hands. Music was playing somewhere: a sprightly prewar dance tune arranged for a small combo. There was no sign of the green panel truck, but an arrow pegged in the driveway directed deliveries around the side of the house.

  Brownie, the houseman, opened the door to the bell. He'd traded his apron for a white dinner jacket, black bow tie crooked and looking like the propeller screw on a battleship against his broad brown throat. The raised scar of an old scalp wound showed through his coiled graying hair. At sight of his scowl, Vasco regretted showing up empty-handed, even knowing how pathetic a three-pound ham would look among glistening slabs of fresh beef. But the big man stepped aside to let him enter and held out a hand—the one with all its fingers—for his hat. Another pair of Al's castoff trousers swung clear of his insteps.

  Vasco drifted toward the sound of voices and music. The living room was a dazzle of sunlight, the drapes drawn aside from glass-door walls fronting on a blue pool that he thought at first was the bay. To have heard about the size of the pool, bigger than many houses, wasn't the same as seeing it.

  "How, chief! You missed a corker last night."

  He blinked, not recognizing Danny Coughlin at first without his blue serge. Mae's brother, the Capones' driver, weaved out of a cluster of guests chattering by the fireplace, wearing a loud print shirt with the tail outside gray gabardine slacks. He clutched a glass tumbler half-filled with amber liquid and ice cubes in one fist. His big Irish face was red and his eyes lacked focus, the blue irises swimming in scarlet. His other hand seized Vasco's. All the male family members seemed to have practiced shaking hands with a stone hammer.

  Belatedly, Vasco remembered Danny's invitation to watch Buffalo Bill in the living-room theater. "I'm sorry I couldn't make it. I'll be sure and go see it on your recommendation."

  "Gangster picture tonight." A stage whisper, delivered in his ear with a gust of bourbon breath. "Al says they help take his mind off business."

  He didn't know how to respond. His experiences with his father had taught him that people in a drunken condition were difficult to carry on conversations with. He was rescued by Rose the maid, who suddenly appeared between them offering an etched silver tray containing hors d'oeuvres. As he was carefully selecting a morsel of broccoli and cheese from among shrimp puffs and things wrapped in bacon (it was Friday, as Father Kyril had pointed out), Danny drifted outside by way of the sliding doors. Vasco placed his choice on a paper napkin and thanked Rose, who smiled and dipped a knee. She looked crisp in black-and-white and smelled faintly of lemon-scented soap, much to his approval. He disliked perfumes and colognes.

  After she left to serve others, he felt marooned. The guests, some in cocktail attire, others dressed more casually in sports shirts and jackets and sundresses, stood in groups talking, sipping from glasses shaped like funnels and silos, and munching on ladyfingers and tiny triangular sandwiches, engrossed in their private galaxies. The preponderance of tans suggested year-around residents and vacationers who took bungalows by the season; wealthy people and people of social influence, if not political, as in earlier days; souvenir hunters in search of anecdotes, not the vote in the sixty-sixth ward. As two women passed him presumably bound for the powder room, he overheard part of their conversation; "A machine gun, can you believe it? Covered by a towel. She actually sat on it in the cabana. Of course, that was before."

  "Sylvia said there was an Indian chest in the master bedroom filled with cash: nothing smaller than hundred-dollar bills in stacks. She went up there looking for a"—whispered word, probably tampon—"I'm sure the government has it all now." Gray hair and crow's-feet abounded; one old lady in raw silk and pearls leaned on a cane with a rubber foot. He was the only person in the room under forty, not counting the maid. He'd have felt ostracized by his youth if he thought anyone was paying attention to the man in the clerical collar trying to keep crumbs off his coat.

  He went outside, where the flat surface of the water hammered blue back at the sky, bright as burnished steel. The pool was a rectangular slot in an acre of mosaic that looked as if the island had been built around it. More guests stood and reclined in chaises on its apron. Here were swimsuits, robes, puddles spreading where people dripped. A woman whose figure was not yet matronly posed in a white sharkskin suit and bathing cap on the end of a diving board, bounced twice, and executed a respectable swan into the water. The ripples struggled to reach the other end and patted the concrete gently. A man with a potbelly left his cigarette burning in his mouth to applaud.

  Behind a portable bar, a short dark Cuban in a dinner jacket chugged a cocktail shaker to the beat of a four-piece band playing nearby ("Never saw the sun/shining so bright...")A brief line waited in front of the bar. Danny Coughlin was part of it.

  Brownie cruised up carrying a tray full of drinks. Vasco declined, but took advantage of the tray to discard his napkin. The houseman moved on, silent in his tread.

  Vasco had begun to wonder if host and hostess were absent when Mae Capone detached herself from a group gathered under a squat palm and came his way, towing a man in a cream-colored shirt and tan flannels by the arm. She wore a white tennis dress that left her mottled shoulders bare. With no clouds to interrupt reflection, her eyes looked as deep blue as her brother's. She was a very attractive middle-aged w
oman and must have been a startling beauty at twenty.

  "I'm glad you could come, Father. I was beginning to think you'd had second thoughts about the company."

  He took her hand. It seemed to maintain the same cool temperature indoors and out. He noticed she'd addressed him as Father for the first time. "I wish I had a more original excuse, but I had a flat on the bridge. The toll man changed it for me."

  "Third one I heard about today! In six months we'll all be on foot. Dear Henry," she said. "I suppose he told you that story about turning down Al's tip."

  He said he did. He kept the other story to himself. There was something sinister about it. How many other garages had Capone rented, and how many had he actually used, and for what purpose?

  "The poor man can't have much to talk about. The world's turned so many times, and there he is still in his booth."

  "Well, I'm glad he was there today."

  "What's the matter, they don't teach you to fix flats at the seminary?"

  He shifted his attention to the young man at Mae's side, who had spoken. He was tall and well-built, heavy-faced, with beautiful lips Vasco had seen before on someone else. His broad smile drew the sting from his words.

  "Sonny, that's no way to talk to a priest."

  "Sorry, Father." But the grin remained in place.

  "Father Peter Vasco, Albert Capone. I apologize for my son's manners. I promised him I'd find someone his age to talk to, but I didn't tell him the rest."

  "No reason to apologize. For what it's worth, Henry beat me to the jack." He found Sonny's handshake normal and brief, a refreshing change. A wire led from a button in his left ear to an object that resembled an electric-blanket control clipped to his pocket. He was partially deaf, the result of mastoid surgery to correct a defect Capone's doctors attributed to his syphilis, contracted in a Brooklyn brothel before Sonny was conceived. How odd to meet a man whose prehistory he knew so well.

  "I saw a picture of you with Babe Ruth."

  Mae's face stiffened, and he knew he'd taken a bad chance. "I wish he'd never gone to that game. My boy's face in the crime section with the trunk murderers and rapists."

  "It made me a hero at school. I don't think the Bambino minded the publicity, either."

  "I was eight years old the first time I saw it. I envied you...." Once again he drew from the armory of truth. He hadn't known at the time who the smiling, scar-faced man was in the picture, but he'd wanted to be the boy.

  Al Capone's son shrugged. "It was okay. My real interest was football." His smile turned bitter; he'd played during his brief time at Notre Dame, an unwelcome memory. "Dad says your dad worked for him in Chicago."

  Mae touched his arm, sparing Vasco the effort of framing a diplomatic answer. "See if you can get your uncle Danny to slow down his drinking. I think he forgot he's driving Rose home tonight."

  "I'll see if I can find a brick to hit him with. I don't know how to stop him otherwise. It was good to meet you, Father."

  "Please call me Peter. Under the right circumstances we might have been at school together." He shook Sonny's hand again.

  "I wish we had."

  When he left, Mae said, "A normal childhood, that's the only thing we couldn't afford to give him. You can do everything right for your children and it can still turn out wrong."

  "He seems to have his feet on the ground." It seemed a priestly thing to say. "His father spoiled him. He adores Sonny. But you're right. He's a mechanic's apprentice at the air depot in Miami, contributing to the effort. His deafness is an advantage there. You couldn't imagine a noisier place. And he's a good husband and father." She put her arm in his and led him away from the pool. "The last thing I wanted you two to talk about was old times. Young people should live in the present."

  "The present is a frightening place."

  "You weren't around for the past."

  Capone's bodyguards were easier to spot with a crowd in place; they were the only ones wandering around without a drink or a snack. When a private plane circled overhead, turning into the wind with engines groaning to land in Miami Beach, Vasco saw the undersides of half a dozen jaws.

  "You have a beautiful home."

  "Al's proud of it. He built the cabana and that ridiculous pool and hired an army to do the landscaping. It belonged to a brewer who rarely came down. An old associate. The place was a jungle."

  The palm trees were spaced widely apart like columns, with no shrubbery to provide cover for intruders ... a regular fortress, Lieutenant Fowler had said, with Biscayne Bay for a moat.

  "You've made many friends here."

  "Well, we can always count on those men in hot heavy jackets. Some of the others are friends. The rest are here to pet the giraffe."

  He puzzled over that.

  "Al will be happy to see you. He's talked about practically nothing else all week."

  At a round glass table sheltered under a broad umbrella, the master of the house sat playing cards with a group of male guests. His striped terry robe hung open over a black one-piece swimsuit stretched taut across his barrel torso and his square solid feet were stuck in black suede slippers with dragons on the toes. A thick cigar with a red-and-gold band smoldered in the corner of his mouth, distorting his face on that side. Vasco thought of every Edward G. Robinson movie he had ever seen, with the addition of a pair of gold-rimmed glasses on the end of the Capone nose. They appeared in none of the dozens of photographs he'd studied. A vain man, Al, who powdered his face to cover the scars.

  "Snorky, is that the same cigar you were smoking twenty minutes ago?" Mae's eyes went to a white ceramic ashtray the size of a dinner plate on the table, littered with ash in heaps and hollow cylinders. Embossed letters around the rim identified it as the property of the Lexington Hotel. What was petty theft in a career founded on murder?

  He looked up at her, startled. His hair, what was left of it, was slicked back and dripping down his neck. He'd had a swim. "Well, sure. A good corona takes an hour. You're in a hurry to finish, get yourself a box of Dutch Masters." He spread his cards faceup on the table. "Gin."

  One of the other players, white-haired with curdled skin, cleared his throat delicately. "Al, it's pinochle, not rummy."

  "Oh, right." He picked up the cards and started rearranging them. Another player folded.

  "Snorky, look who's here," Mae said.

  He looked at her again over the tops of the glasses, then at Vasco. The gray eyes looked murky. He took the cigar out of his mouth and smiled. "Afternoon, Your Reverence. How's that new roof holding up?"

  "It's not Bishop Fantonetti, dear. It's Peter Vasco. You remember, Paul Vasco's son from Cicero."

  The grin flickered, then brightened. Capone laid the cigar in the tray and reached up to crush Vasco's fingers. His palm was clammy. "Hiya."

  The player who'd thrown in his hand got up to offer his seat. Vasco accepted, grateful to be relieved of the burden of standing. It was clear Capone had no idea who he was. He'd joined the game too late. Al's mind was gone.

  ELEVEN

  The white-haired man with the mealy complexion—he turned out to be the president of the Dade County Board of Realtors—dealt the next hand. Vasco held up a palm when he turned his direction. "I don't know how to play."

  "Does it matter?" muttered the other.

  Mae's eyes darkened. When the realtor saw them, like twin shotgun muzzles, he looked down quickly at the deck in his hand. But Capone was lost in his cards and didn't seem to be listening.

  The fourth party at the table spoke up. "I'm up for gin rummy."

  "I don't know how to play that either."

  The man's mouth hung open. He was pudgy-faced with buck teeth and looked like a beaver gulping oxygen. Apart from Vasco he appeared to be the youngest person present. He looked remotely familiar, like someone seen in a photograph. "Good Lord, Father, were you raised in a monastery?"

  "Parker, mind your manners," Mae said. Vasco had sized her up as the den mother of Palm Island, correcting the
behavior of sons, brothers, and men of tender years.

  "I am sorry;" and he sounded as if he was. "It's just that I grew up here. If you don't learn to swim and play cards, you might as well walk into the ocean."

  Mae laughed, a girlish sound coming from the iron matriarch. "Parker's a native Floridian. He went to school with dolphins. His father's a former mayor of Miami."

  "Parker Henderson." He stuck out a plump hand without a torn cuticle in sight.

  "Peter Vasco." He grasped it. He expected to qualify for a term in office by day's end, all this pressing of flesh. He knew who the man was now. Parker Henderson managed the Ponce de Leon Hotel, where Ralph Capone had had a meeting and where Al had stayed locally until he moved into his house. Henderson had been instrumental in that transaction, and several others. His picture had found its way into the FBI file along with a transcript of his testimony as a reluctant witness for the prosecution during Capone's trial for tax evasion. He and Reinhart Schwimmer would have understood each other, the spoiled child of wealth and politics and the hapless optometrist slain on St. Valentine's Day, a victim of his extracurricular interests. They shared a boy's fascination with gangsters, drawing a vicarious thrill from associating with them, as Capone had when rubbing elbows with baseball players and movie stars. In Henderson's case, the infatuation had led him into willing service as a bagman for the Outfit, taking delivery on shipments of cash on his idol's behalf and putting it through channels, buying ordnance and corrupting public servants. He'd done his part, however unwittingly, in arming the assassins in the garage on North Clark Street.

  "We gonna play cards or patty-cake?" Capone barked. It was the first sign of impatience Vasco had seen from him, a mild taste of his tantrums in the boardroom at the Hawthorne Inn and the roadhouse in Indiana where Scalise and Anselmi had left their brains.

  The realtor, an irritable sort also, said, "Well, we can't play gin or pinochle without a fourth. Even poker would just be pushing the same money around till you wouldn't know Abe Lincoln from Wendell Willkie."