The Million-Dollar Wound nh-3

by Max Allan Collins

  “When I first got back from overseas,” I said, “I had trouble sleeping. But lately I catch myself napping every time I turn around. I’m really sorry.”

  He waved that off. He looked at me; his eyes narrowed-in concern? Or was that suspicion?

  “I hope my business meeting didn’t disturb your sleep,” he said.

  “Nope,” I said, cheerfully. I hoped not too transparently cheerfully. “Slept right through it.”

  “Why was it you wanted to talk to me, Heller?”

  “Uh, you invited me here, Frank.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Correa called you. That prick.”

  “He’s going to call me to testify. I guess they were keeping tabs on you, when we were having our various meetings over the years. They’re going to ask about those meetings, and…”

  He shrugged. “Forget it.”

  “Well, that’s what I intend to do. What you and I talked about is nobody’s business but ours. Like I told Campagna, I got some convenient after-effects of my combat duty-they treated me for amnesia, while I was in the bughouse. I don’t remember nothing, Frank.”

  He patted my shoulder. “I’m proud of what you did over there.”

  “What?”

  “I brag on you to my boy, all the time. You were a hero.” He got up and crossed to an expensive, possibly antique cabinet and took out a bottle of wine and poured himself a glass. “This is a great country. Worth fighting for. An immigrant like me can have a home and a family and a business. Some vino, kid?”

  “No thanks, Frank.”

  He drank the wine, pacing slowly around the little study. “I never worried about you, kid. You coulda gone running off the mouth about Cermak, and you didn’t. You coulda done the same thing where Dillinger was concerned, but you didn’t. You understand it, omerta, and you ain’t even one of us.”

  “Frank, I’m not going to betray you.”

  He sat down next to me. “You seen Ness lately?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Last month.”

  “You know what he’s doing these days?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and smiled.

  Nitti sat there and laughed.

  “Al coulda used his help,” he said, and laughed some more.

  When he stopped laughing, he finished the glass of wine and said, “That’s another secret you kept.”

  “Frank?”

  “You knew about O’Hare.”

  I swallowed. “You mean, you knew…”

  “That you figured out I…” He gestured with one hand, as if sculpting something. “…sent Al away. Yeah. I saw it in your eyes, kid, when we talked that time.”

  He meant that night in ’39 in the suite at the Bismarck.

  “Then why in hell am I alive?” I said.

  “I told you to stay out of my business. You stayed out, more or less. I trust you. I respect you.”

  “Frank-I’m right in thinking you didn’t have anything to do with Estelle Carey’s death, aren’t I?”

  “Would I invite such heat?” His face tightened into an angry mask. “My bloodthirsty friend Paul the Waiter sent those”-and then he said something in Sicilian that sounded very vile indeed-“to hit her. He was afraid she’d talk, this grand jury thing. I believe her killers took it on themselves to try to make her talk.” He laughed without humor. “To make her lead them to money she never had.”

  “Money she…what?”

  He got up and poured himself some more wine. “The Carey dame never had Nicky’s dough. He didn’t trust her. He thought she’d fingered him to the feds. That million of his, well, it’s really just under a million, the feds exaggerate, so they can tax you more…anyway, that million is stashed away for Nicky when he gets out. He’s being a pretty good boy. He’s talked some, but not given ’em anything they didn’t already have. Willie and Browne, well…don’t invest in their stock.”

  Nitti’s openness was startling. And frightening. Was he drunk? Was he telling me things he’d regret telling me, later?

  “You killing that bastard Borgia and his bitch was a good thing,” he said. “And then calling me so we could clean up, that I also appreciate. Think of what the papers woulda done with that; talk about stirring up the heat. Do you know how many of the boys have been pulled in over the Carey dame? Shit. That’s Ricca for you. Anyway.” He sipped his wine. “I owe you one.”

  He’d said that to me before, more than once. More than twice.

  “Hey, you have some wine, now,” he said.

  I had some wine. We sat and drank it and I said, “If you feel you owe me one, Frank, I’d like to collect.”

  Nitti shrugged. “Sure. Why not.”

  “You know about my friend Barney Ross.”

  He nodded. Of course he knew; I’d heard it from him. Or from Campagna. Same difference-before tonight, at least.

  He said, “Have you talked to him about this problem of his?”

  “Yes I have,” I said. “And he claims he can handle the stuff. He needs it for his pain, he says. To help him sleep. He acted like it was no big deal-then made me promise not to tell his wife, his family.”

  “He’s a good man,” Nitti said. “He shouldn’t have this monkey on his back. It will ruin him.”

  “I know.”

  It seemed to anger Nitti. “He’s a hero. Kids look up to him. He shouldn’t go down that road.”

  “Then help me stop him.”

  He looked at me; the old Nitti seemed to be home, if only briefly, in the hard eyes.

  “Put the word out,” I said. “Nobody in Chicago sells dope to Barney Ross. Cut off his supply. Capeesh?”

  “Capeesh,” Nitti said.

  We shook hands at the front door and I walked out into the wintry air, wondering how many eyes other than Nitti’s were on me.

  Drury drove. We left his unmarked car on Cermak Road, near Woodlawn Cemetery, and walked along the railroad tracks, south. A light drizzling rain was falling. These were Illinois Central tracks, freight, not commuter; at this time of afternoon, just a little before four, there would be little or no train traffic, not till after rush hour-Cermak Road was too major a thoroughfare to be held up by a train, this time of day.

  We were out in the boonies, really. To my left a few blocks was downtown Berwyn, but just due north was a working farm; and right here, the tracks ran through a virtual prairie-tall grass, scrub brush and trees. Up at right was a wire fence, behind which loomed the several faded brick buildings of a sanitarium. Some uniformed cops were gathered there; three men in coveralls, railroad workers obviously, were being questioned over to one side.

  I followed Drury down the gentle embankment from the tracks through brush and tall grass to where the cops stood by the wire fence. One of the cops, a man in his fifties, in a white cap, walked to Drury and extended a hand and the men shook, as the white-capped cop said, “Chief Rose, of the Riverside P. D. You’d be Captain Drury.”

  Drury said he was.

  “Thanks for getting out here so quickly. We need you to positively ID the body. And we could use a little advice about where to go from here…”

  Drury didn’t introduce me; everybody just assumed I was another cop. This time I’d been in his office, when he got the call. Correa had asked him to talk to me again, and as a courtesy I’d taken the El over to Town Hall Station. I was sitting there being scolded by him when his phone rang.

  Now here we were, in a ditch next to an IC spur between North Riverside and Berwyn, in the midst of a bunch of confused suburban cops who’d drawn a stiff who was just a little out of their league-although very much a resident of their neck of the woods.

  He sat slumped against the fence, parting the tall grass around him, brown fedora askew on his head, which rested back against a steel post, eyes shut, a revolver in his right hand-a little black.32, it looked like-and wearing a snappy gray checked suit, expensive brown plaid overcoat, blue and maroon silk scarf. On his shoes were rubbers; some snow was still on the ground, after all. Above his shoes stretched the off-w
hite of long woolen underwear. Behind his right ear was a bullet hole; above his left ear was the exit wound.

  Both Drury and I bent over him, one on either side of him. The smell of cordite was in the air.

  “He must’ve got his hair cut this morning,” I said.

  “Why do you say that?” Drury asked.

  I hadn’t told Drury that just yesterday I’d seen this man. And I wasn’t about to.

  “Just looks freshly cut, that’s all. You can smell the pomade.”

  “I can smell the wine. He must’ve been dead drunk. Well, now he’s just dead.”

  Drury stood. He said to Chief Rose, “That’s Frank Nitti, all right.”

  “His driver’s license says Nitto,” Rose said.

  Drury shrugged. “Nitto’s his real name.” He laughed shortly. “He thought ‘Nitti’ sounded more American, I guess.”

  I was still bent over Nitti’s body. I carefully lifted the hat off his head. The brown fedora had several bullet holes in it. Five, to be exact.

  “Bill,” I said. “Take a look at this.”

  I showed him the hat. “How in the hell does one bullet through the head put five holes in your hat? From the angle of the fatal shot, there should be only one hole, about here…” And I put my pinky through that very hole. “What made these others? Mice?”

  Drury took the hat and turned it around in his hands, studying it, frowning.

  Chief Rose said, “We’ve got witnesses. Maybe they can help explain.”

  He took us over to the three railroad workers. Two of them were skinny, in their forties, and looked uncannily alike, although they proved not to be brothers. The third was heavyset and about thirty-five.

  Drury identified himself, and one of the skinny ones stepped forward and said he was William Seebauer, conductor; he and the other men, a switchman and a flagman, were on an IC switch engine when it started. He wore wire-frame glasses-which was about all that distinguished him from the other skinny man-and as he spoke he occasionally removed them and rubbed the drizzle of rain off the lenses, nervously.

  “It was around three o’clock,” he said, “and we were backing the train south, caboose in front. After we crossed Cermak Road, I saw a man about a block and a half down, going the same direction as us, south, walking on the tracks just over from us. He was staggering. I thought maybe he was drunk.”

  “How fast were you going?” Drury asked.

  “Not very. When we got up close to him, I was on the platform, and hollered, ‘Hi there, buddy,’ and at that, the guy raised his hand and there was a revolver in it. He fired at me, and I ducked.”

  I asked, “How many shots did he fire at you?”

  “Two,” Seebauer said. The switchman and flagman standing nearby both nodded at that.

  “What happened then?” Drury asked.

  “The man was wavering around and I didn’t think his aim was good. He staggered down the embankment”-he stopped and pointed at the fence and Nitti’s body-“and ended up there. Sat down, or fell down. I couldn’t say.”

  “And?”

  “Well, I ordered the train stopped and we got off and walked back toward him. He was sitting there with his eyes closed. I told the other boys, ‘Watch this guy-he’s nuts. He may be making believe he’s passed out just to take another shot at us.’ So we moved slow. We were maybe sixty feet of him when his eyes opened, and he looked at us. Kind of rolled his eyes.” The conductor swallowed. “Then he raised the gun to his head. He didn’t miss what he was shooting at that time.”

  Drury had the other two tell their stories, individually. While that was going on, I went back to the body. I knelt over him. It.

  “Shit, Frank,” I said.

  A cop nearby said, “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. I got a handkerchief out of my pocket and carefully lifted the gun from his hand; I shook open the cylinder. Three bullets remained. Three had been fired.

  Soon Drury came over. “Their stories all match, pretty much.”

  “Three bullets fired, Bill.” I showed him the revolver.

  He took it, and my hanky.

  “That makes sense,” he said. “He fires two shots at the caboose boys, and put one in his head. Two plus one makes three in my school.”

  “Really? Tell me, Bill, the day you graduated-how many bullet holes did you have in your mortar board?”

  His mouth distorted as he thought that over. “Maybe he wasn’t shooting at the boys on the train. They just heard shots and thought he was.”

  “Who or what was he shooting at, then?”

  “His own head, of course!”

  “And he missed? And his hat didn’t fly off when these misaimed bullets flew through?”

  Drury shrugged. “There are always anomalies in a case like this.”

  “Anomalies my ass! Is that how you explain evidence that doesn’t suit you? Dismissing it?”

  “Heller, you’re just a civilian observer here. Here at my discretion. Don’t cause any trouble.”

  “What do you think happened here, Captain Drury?”

  He put his hands on the hips of his expensive black topcoat and smirked. “Gee, I’m trying to work up a suitable theory that makes sense with what little we got-namely, three eyewitnesses who saw a guy shoot himself in the head, and a guy with a gun in his hand and a hole in his head. I’m just leaning the slightest little bit in the direction of suicide. What do you make of it, Heller?”

  I motioned around us. “Look at these clumps of bushes; the high grass, weeds. He was running, staggering. Drunk? Sure, from the smell of him he’d been drinking. Granted. But mightn’t he been running from somebody?”

  “Who?”

  “People trying to kill him, Bill. Maybe he was out walking and somebody took a shot at him from those bushes, and he started running away. He was known to take regular walks, you know.”

  “No I don’t,” he said. He eyed me suspiciously. “How do you?”

  “Never mind. He did take walks. Maybe he walked a regular route-this route. We’re only a few blocks from his house-he was headed home. Somebody took a shot at him, possibly using a silenced gun, and when he returned fire, those caboose crawlers thought he was shooting at them.”

  Drury smiled humorlessly and shook his head. “And then an assassin in the bushes shot him in the head just as the railroad boys were approaching, I suppose?”

  I looked up at the sky; let it spit on me. “No, Bill. Nitti shot himself. I don’t question that.”

  “What do you question, then?”

  “The circumstances. I think he fell, fleeing would-be assassins-knocked himself out. Maybe he was blind drunk and fell, what’s the difference? Anyway, when he opened his eyes he saw the hazy image of three men walking toward him-sixty, seventy feet away-and rather than give Ricca the pleasure, he raised his gun to his head in one last act of defiance and ended it all.”

  “Ricca?”

  I shrugged. “There’s a rift between Ricca and Nitti-and the Outfit’s sided with Ricca.”

  “Who says?”

  “Everybody knows that. Get out of your office once in a while. Let’s say Ricca put a contract out on Nitti. His torpedoes tried to kill Frank, today, along these tracks, and when the switchman and flagman and their conductor jumped off the train, the torpedoes headed for the hills. Unseen. Only Nitti didn’t know they’d gone. And he mistook the IC men approaching him for his assassins.”

  Drury thought about that. “That’s where the bullet holes in his hat came from? They shot at him and missed, these torpedoes of yours and Ricca’s?”

  “Yeah. Or Nitti hit the high weeds himself, when the first shot rang out. And then stuck his hat up on a stick or on his finger, to draw their fire. Maybe.” I shrugged again. “Who knows?”

  “Anomalies, Heller,” he said. “These things never sort out exactly right.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “I think he shot himself in the head.”

  “Cornered by Ricca’s gunmen, he
did.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  I couldn’t answer that. I walked away from him, my hands in my topcoat pockets. Why did it matter to me? Why did I want to believe Frank Nitti’s final act was one of defiance, not despair?

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. Drury.

  He said, “When we get some more cops out here, some more real cops, I’ll have these ditches combed. If we find any more spent shells, I’ll give your theory some thought. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You liked the man, didn’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t say I liked him.”

  “Respected him, then.”

  “Let’s just say I knew him.”

  We walked back toward the suburban cops and Nitti’s body. Chief Rose approached us. He said, “I never heard of one of these big gangsters killing himself before. Isn’t this a little unusual?’

  “Frankly,” Drury said, “I’m not surprised. Nitti’s been in ill health. He probably figured he was due for prison, and that he couldn’t get the express medical care he desired there-so he took the easy way out.”

  That was the way Bill wanted it to be. He hated the gangsters, and he loved the idea of making a coward out of Nitti. Bill was a fine cop, a good man, a better friend; but I knew my reading of how Nitti had died would be lost in the shuffle. Maybe it was wrong of me to look at the facts and investigate wanting to prove Nitti died defiantly; but it was just as wrong for Drury to do the same wanting to prove Nitti a coward. Bill was in charge, though; and the way he saw it would be the way it went down.

  Then, suddenly, in a black coat and a black dress, already in mourning, automatically in mourning, there she was: Antoinette Cavaretta. The current Mrs. Frank Nitti. The widow Nitti. The steel woman. On the arm of a uniformed cop who’d gone to get her, at Chief Rose’s request, as it turned out.

  She walked falteringly to the fence where Nitti lay; she knelt by him and held his hand and made a sign of the cross.

  She stood.

  “This was my husband,” she said.