The Million-Dollar Wound nh-3

by Max Allan Collins

  Her usually dark face seemed pale; she wore very little makeup. The uniformed man escorted her a ways away from the body.

  Drury went to her; I followed.

  “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Nitti,” Drury said.

  “Don’t be a hypocrite, Captain Drury,” she said. “We both know you hated my husband.”

  I said, “Where were you when this happened?”

  She looked at me sharply. “Praying for my husband.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “Frank left about one o’clock and said he was going downtown to see his lawyer. I was worried. He’s been sick, and then this grand jury trouble came up. So I went to church, to Our Lady of Sorrows, and made a novena for him.”

  Drury shot me a look as if to say this news proved that Nitti had set out today to commit suicide.

  She said, “You people have always persecuted him. Poor Frank! He never did a wrong thing in his life.”

  Drury said nothing.

  “Do I need your permission,” she asked, bitterly, “to make the funeral arrangements? To have my husband removed to a mortuary?”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Drury said. “Due to the circumstances of his death, it’s the county morgue for him.”

  She gave him a look to kill. “You’re so superior, Captain. Don’t take such a death so lightly. You and my husband played in the same arena; such an end could well be yours one day.”

  “Is that a threat, Mrs. Nitti?”

  “No, Mr. Drury. It’s the voice of experience. Now, I’d like to go home. I have a little boy who’ll be coming home from St. Mary’s in half an hour. There’s difficult news I must share with him.”

  “Certainly you can go,” he said, not unkindly.

  “Why don’t I walk her?” I asked him.

  “It’s not necessary,” she said.

  “I’d like to,” I said.

  Drury didn’t care.

  Mrs. Nitti said, “I would appreciate an arm to lean on, Mr. Heller, yes.”

  I gave her my arm and we walked back up along the tracks toward Cermak Road; it was the opposite direction from her house, but the closest street that crossed the tracks.

  “My husband was fond of you,” she said.

  “Sometimes he had funny ways of showing it.”

  We walked.

  “That was Frank,” she said, as if that explained everything.

  “Mrs. Nitti-or should I call you Toni?”

  She took her arm from mine. Stopped for a moment. “Mrs. Nitti will be just fine. Do I sense a touch of disrespect in your voice?”

  “I must say you’re taking your husband’s death well, Mrs. Nitti. You’re a rock, aren’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, that the first time I saw you, you were in the presence of a dead man. Oh, he didn’t know he was dead, or at least he didn’t like to think he was. But with your help, his faithful secretary’s help, E. J. O’Hare got dead. Good and dead.”

  She looked at me coldly, impassively; but she was pulling breath in like a race horse.

  “A few years go by, and then you turn up again. At Frank Nitti’s front door. His loving wife. The wife of a dead man. That was the difference between Frank and O’Hare-your husband knew he was dead. When I spoke to him last night, I could tell he knew he was very near the end. He was a brave man, I think.”

  “Yes he was,” she said.

  “I wonder,” I said, “if you were keeping tabs on Frank for Ricca, like you kept tabs on O’Hare for Frank.”

  “You’re a fool.”

  “Am I? How’s this for foolish? Frank Nitti, unknown to all but a handful-said handful including you and E. J. O’Hare-betrayed Al Capone to the feds.”

  Her eyes flickered.

  “It’s so obvious,” I said, “but no one ever thought of it…even though key Capone witness Les Shumway was still employed at Sportsman’s Park. Of course, Nitti arranged Capone’s downfall. Of course, Nitti moved the chess pieces until he was king himself. In a way, I admire him for it.”

  “So,” she said, “do I.”

  “But then his wife Anna dies. She was the love of his life. She, and his son, were everything to him. And he begins to slide. He goes into the hospital, for the old back trouble from the wounds Mayor Cermak’s boys caused. And for the ulcers that developed after he was wounded.”

  “His heart was also bad,” she said. “And he was convinced he had stomach cancer. I wouldn’t want you to leave anything out, Mr. Heller.”

  “Stomach cancer. Perfect. I bet YOU don’t even know why he had that notion.”

  “Certainly I do, she said. “The assassin who killed Cermak believed he had stomach cancer.”

  “That’s right. Joe Zangara. The one-man Sicilian suicide squad who pretended to shoot at FDR so that your husband could bring Mayor Cermak down without… I can almost hear Frank saying it…‘stirring up the heat.’”

  “My husband was a brilliant man.”

  “Once,” I said “He was-once. He began to slip, though, didn’t he? Despondent over his wife’s death, he took long solitary walks. He even began to drink a little-not like him, not at all like him. His memory began to falter. That’s where you come in.”

  “Really? In what way?”

  “A marriage of convenience. A business arrangement You ran a dogtrack in Miami, you helped run Sportsman’s Park. You’d been Frank’s inside ‘man’ with O’Hare. Frank had a son he loved very much, who needed a mother-a strong person who could look after little Joseph’s interests after he was gone. A mob insider like you, that was perfect. And, maybe, it was a way to keep you from ever spilling what you knew about Frank setting up Capone. Hell, maybe you blackmailed him into marrying you.”

  She let out a long breath, and began to walk again. Quickly. I walked right alongside her.

  “You know what I think, Mrs. Nitti?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you’ve had practice being a widow. After all, you’ve been a black widow for years.”

  She stopped in her tracks, next to the tracks, and she slapped me. Hard. A hard, ringing, stinging slap.

  “What do you know?” she said. There was bitterness in the throaty voice, but something else too: pain.

  But I pressed on, my cheek flaming, like Estelle Carey in her final moments. “You want me to believe you weren’t keeping tabs on him for Ricca? That you didn’t send him out to meet his death on his regular walk, today?”

  “I don’t care what you believe.”

  She slowed. She stopped. She turned to me.

  “I loved Frank,” she said. “I loved him for years. And he came to love me. He worshipped Anna, but he loved me.”

  “Goddamn,” I said, stopped in my tracks now. “I believe you.”

  She shook her head slowly, lecturing with a jerky finger. “Perhaps some…some… of what you said is true…but know this: I was never in Ricca’s pocket. I never betrayed Frank. I didn’t blackmail him into marriage. I’m no black widow! No black widow.” She sat down, on the slope, by the tracks. “Just a widow. Another widow.”

  I sat next to her. “I’m sorry.”

  It was still raining, a little. Still drizzling.

  She was breathing heavily. “I understand. You felt something for my husband. That’s what caused your anger.”

  “I guess so.”

  The pain was showing on her face now. “It’s hard to lose him like this. Death by his own hand.”

  “My father committed suicide,” I said.

  She looked at me.

  “He put a bullet in his head, too.” I looked at her. “It’s something you learn to live with, but you never forget.”

  “Perhaps you’ve lost another father today.”

  “That’s putting it a little strong. But I am sorry to see the old bastard go.”

  Then I looked at her again and she was weeping. The steel lady was weeping.

  So I put my arm around her and she wept into m
y shoulder.

  When I left her at her door, the boy was just getting home.

  I had supposed the final favor Frank Nitti promised me was one he’d been unable to keep. After all, I asked him Thursday night; and Friday afternoon he was dead.

  But Saturday morning a pale, shaking Barney Ross, in civvies for a change, brown jacket, gray slacks and a hastily knotted tie under a wrinkled gray raincoat, came into my office, around eleven, slamming the door behind him.

  I was standing at Gladys’s desk, handing her my notes on an insurance report.

  “We gotta talk,” he said. He was sweating. It was starting to look and feel just a little like spring out there, but nobody was sweating yet. Except Barney.

  Gladys seemed thrown by this uncharacteristically sloppy, angry Barney Ross. And it took quite a bit to throw a cool customer like her.

  “Forget this last report,” I told her. “Go ahead and take off a little early.” We only worked till noon on Saturday.

  “Sure, Mr. Heller,” she said, rising, gathering her things. “See you Monday.” And, with one last wide-eyed glance back at us, she was out the door.

  “Step into my office,” I said, gesturing, smiling.

  His one arm hung at his side, hand shaking; the other leaned against the wooden walking stick, which trembled like a coconut palm in a storm. “Did you do this, Nate?”

  “Step into my office. Sit down. Take a load off.”

  He went ahead of me, as quickly as his walking stick would allow; sat down. I got behind the desk. He was rubbing his hands on his trousered thighs. He didn’t look at me.

  “Did you do this thing to me?”

  “Do what, Barney?”

  Now he tried to look at me, but it was hard for him; his eyes darted around, not lighting anywhere. “Nobody’ll sell me anything. I need my medicine, Nate.”

  “You mean you need a fix.”

  “It’s for my headaches, and earaches. The malaria relapses. Goddamn, if you don’t understand this, who would?”

  “Go to a doctor.”

  “I… I used up the doctors the first three weeks, Nate. They’ll only give me a shot, once. I had to go to the streets.”

  “Where you’ve found your supply has suddenly dried up.”

  “You did it, didn’t you? Why did you do it?”

  “What makes you think I did?”

  His sweaty face contorted. “You’ve got the pull with the Outfit boys. You coulda gone straight to Nitti himself. That’s what it would take, to dry this town up for me like this.”

  “Don’t you read the papers, pal? Nitti’s dead.”

  “I don’t care. You did it. Why? Aren’t you my friend?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t hang around with junkies.”

  He covered his face with one hand; he was shaking bad. “You can’t stop me. I’m going back out on the road tomorrow. Back on the war-plant circuit. I can find what I need in any town I want. All I got to do is find a new doctor each time-they’ll give it to me. They know who I am, they’ll trust me. They know I’m traveling with a Navy party on this tour…they got no reason to think I’m looking for anything but just one shot of morphine for a malaria flare-up.”

  “Sure,” I said. “That’ll work. And when you run out of doctors, you can go back to the street, to the pushers. But not here. Not in Chicago.”

  “Nate… I live here.”

  “You used to. Maybe you better move to Hollywood with your movie-star wife. You can go make your connection out there. I can’t stop that.”

  “Nate! What are you doing to me?”

  “What are you doing to yourself?”

  “I’ll get past this.”

  “That’s a good idea. Get past it. Get some help. Kick this thing.”

  He screwed his face up, sweat still beading his brow. “You know what the papers’ll do with this? Look what happened to D’Angelo-all that poor bastard did was write some love letters, and they ruined him.”

  I shrugged. “I talked to him a couple of days ago. He’s fine. They’re fitting him a leg. He’ll be working someplace, before you know it. He understands that this thing we went through, we got to put it behind us. You got to put the Island behind you, too, Barney.”

  He was almost crying, now. “How could I ever face people? How can I tell Cathy? What would Ma say, and my brothers and my friends? What…what would Rabbi Stein think? Barney Ross, the kid from the ghetto who became champ, the guy they call a war hero and the idol of kids, a sickening, disgusting dope addict! The shame of it, Nate. The shame…”

  I got up from behind the desk and put a hand on his shoulder. “You got to do it, Barney. You got to check in someplace and take the cure. You can keep the publicity down to a minimum if you go into a private sanitarium, you know.”

  “I… I hear the best place is the government hospital at Lexington. But then everybody’d know…”

  “They’d understand. People know what we went through. They don’t understand the extent of it. But they’ll forgive you.”

  “I don’t know, Nate.”

  “You could start with forgiving yourself.”

  “What…what do you mean?”

  “For killing Monawk.”

  He looked up at me, the tragic brown eyes managing to hold still long enough to lock mine. “You…you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  He looked away. “H-how long have you known?”

  “A little over a month. The night some people broke into my office, it was. Like you, I’d been having nightmares. I dreamed I killed him myself, in one, that night. But when I woke up, I knew I hadn’t. After I thought about it, though, I knew why I’d dreamed that-you killing that poor son of a bitch was the same as me killing him. It was as hard for me to accept, to live with, as if I’d done it myself. That’s why I blocked it, pal. You been sticking a needle in your arm to forget. I managed to forget without any help.”

  He was shaking his head. “God, God. I didn’t mean to.”

  I squeezed his shoulder. “I know you didn’t. He was screaming, giving us away; you had the forty-five in your hand, and you put a hand over his mouth like you did before, only this time the gun just went off. It was an accident.”

  “But I killed him, Nate.”

  “Not really. The war killed him. You were trying to save all us poor wounded bastards, him included.”

  “I didn’t know anybody else saw it happen.”

  “I don’t think anybody did, but me. We were all hurting so bad we were floating in and out of it. But if anybody did, they’ll never say a word.”

  He was looking at the floor. “I… I should have reported it. Admitted it. I let them hang this hero shit on me…what kind of man would do that?”

  “That’s just it. You’re just a man, Barney. And fuck, you were a hero that night. I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been.”

  “I killed him. I kill him over and over in my dreams…”

  “The dreams will pass.”

  “You shouldn’t have done it, Nate. You shouldn’t have cut off my supply.”

  I patted the shoulder. “Someday you’re going to have to learn to live with it. Until that time, go on from town to town selling bonds by day, and scrounging up your fix by night. But don’t do it in Chicago.”

  “This is my hometown, Nate-my family’s here…”

  “They’ll be here when you decide to come back, too. And so will I.”

  He stood, shakily. “I know you did this out of friendship…but it was still wrong…”

  “No it wasn’t,” I said.

  He and his voodoo cane stumbled out of the inner office; I didn’t help him.

  “You might try the abortionist across the hall,” I said.

  “You bastard,” he said. But some of the old fight was in his eyes. Barney was still in there, somewhere, in that shell. Someday maybe he’d crawl out.

  Barney wasn’t the only local boy to make it big in the papers as a war hero. There was also E. J. O’Hare’s so
n, “Butch”-a.k.a. Lieutenant Commander Edward Henry O’Hare, a combat pilot who in 1942 received the Congressional Medal of Honor for shooting down five Jap bombers. He died in aerial combat in 1943, and in ’49, Chicago’s International Airport was renamed O’Hare, honoring the son of the proud father who had died eight years earlier, in combat of another sort.

  Antoinette Cavaretta, Mrs. Frank Nitti, looked after her stepson well. She managed her late husband’s finances, battling (and winning) various IRS assaults; and she continued receiving payments from an Outfit source, namely her old Sportsman’s Park crony Johnny Patton. In 1955 she requested mob banker Moe Greenberg turn over the capital of a trust fund Frank had set up for his boy Joe. The boy was twenty-one, now, and it only seemed fair. Greenberg refused. The Outfit sided with Mrs. Nitti. Moe Greenberg turned up dead on December 8, 1955.

  The boy, Joseph, grew up to be a successful businessman.

  Les Shumway, incidentally, was still working at Sportsman’s Park as late as the early sixties. How his charmed life extended beyond Nitti’s death, I never knew; perhaps the widow Nitti’s fine hand was at work there as well.

  As for the others, many are dead, of course. Jack Barger, in ’59, having branched out from burlesque into pioneering the drive-in movie business. Johnny Patton. Stege. Goldstone. Campagna. Wyman. Sapperstein. Sally. Eliot. When you get to my age, such lists grow long; they end only when your own name is at the bottom-and you’re not alive to put it there, so what the hell.

  Pegler had quite a run, for the ten years following the Pulitzer he won for the Browne/Bioff expose. But he grew even more arrogant, once he’d been legitimized by the prize. His anti-Semitism, his hatred for the Roosevelts, his blasts at the unions, at “Commies,” became an embarrassment. His offkilter opinionated writing grew increasingly self-destructive, until finally he met his downfall when he libeled his old friend Quentin Reynolds. In the 1954 court battle, Louis Nizer-your classic New York Jew liberal lawyer-skewered him; it was never the same after that. By the end-June 1969-he’d lost his syndicated column and was reduced to contributing monthly ramblings to a John Birch Society publication.

  Montgomery, of course, continued to star in motion pictures through the late forties; but he began directing, as well, and was a pioneer in the early days of TV. His interest in politics and social concerns never abated; he was the first TV media adviser to a U.S. president (Eisenhower) and was a vocal critic of the abuses of network TV, being an early advocate of public television. He also continued to be outspoken on the subject of the mob’s influence on Hollywood; his Chicago contact in such matters was Bill Drury.