Chicago Lightning

by Max Allan Collins

  The case was huge in the California press, the first really big crime story since the Black Dahlia. A grand jury convicted the young lovers, and the state attorney general himself took charge of the prosecution.

  My wife was delighted when we spent several weeks having a real summer’s vacation, at the expense of the state of California, thanks to me being a major witness for the prosecution.

  I didn’t stay for the whole trial, which ran well into October, spiced up by steamy love letters that Louise and Bud exchanged, which were intercepted and fed to the newspapers and even submitted to the jury, after Bud’s “filth” (as the late Mrs. Overell would have put it) had been edited out.

  The letters fell short of any confession, and the star-crossed couple presented themselves well in court, Louise coming off as intelligent, mature and self-composed, and Bud seeming boyishly innocent, a big, strangely likable puppy dog.

  The trial took many dramatic twists and turns, including a trip to the charred hulk of the Mary E. in drydock, with Louise and Bud solemnly touring the wreckage in the company of watchful jurors.

  Not unexpectedly, toward the end of the trial, the respective lawyers of each defendant began trying to place the blame on the other guy, ultimately requesting separate trials, which the judge denied.

  After my wife and I had enjoyed our court-paid summer vacation, I kept up with the trial via the press and reports from Fred Rubinski. All along we had both agreed we had never seen such overwhelming, unquestionably incriminating evidence in a murder case—or such a lame defense, namely that Walter Overell had committed suicide, taking his wife along with him.

  Confronted by the testimony of handwriting experts, Bud had even admitted buying the dynamite, claiming he had done so at Walter Overell’s request! Medical testimony established that the Overells had died of fractured skulls, and a receipt turned up showing that Bud had bought the alarm clock used in the makeshift time bomb—a clock d given Louise as a gift. Blood on Bud’s effects was shown to match that of the late Overells.

  And on, and on…. I had never seen a case more open and shut.

  “Are you sitting down?” Fred’s voice said over the phone.

  “Yeah,” I said, and I was, in my office in the Loop.

  “After deliberating for two days, the six men and six women of the jury found Bud and Louise not guilty.”

  I almost fell out of my chair. “What the hell?”

  “The poor kids were ‘victims of circumstance,’ so says the jury—you know, like the Three Stooges? According to the jury, the Overells died due to ‘the accident of suicidal tampering with dynamite by Walter Overell.’”

  “You’re shitting me….”

  “Not at all. Those two fresh-faced kids got off scott free.”

  I was stunned—flabbergasted. “How could a jury face such incontestable evidence and let obvious killers go free?”

  “I don’t know,” Fred said. “It’s a fluke—I can’t imagine it ever happening again…not even in California.”

  The trial took its toll on the lucky pair, however—perhaps because their attorneys had tried to pit Bud and Louise against each other, the girl literally turned her back on the Boy Scout, after the verdict was read, scorning his puppy-dog gaze.

  “I’m giving him back his ring,” she told the swarming press.

  As far as anybody knows, Louise Overell and Bud Gollum never saw each other again.

  Nine months after her release, Louise married one of her jailers—I wondered if he’d been the guy who passed the love letters along to the prosecution. The marriage didn’t last long, though the couple did have a son. Most of Louise’s half million inheritance went to pay for her defense.

  Bud flunked out of pre-med, headed east, married a motor-drome rider with a travelling show. That marriage didn’t last long, either, and eventually Bud got national press again when he was nabbed in Georgia driving a stolen car. He did two years in a federal pen, then worked for a radio station in the South, finally dropping out of public view.

  Louise wound up in Las Vegas, married to a Bonanza Air Lines radio operator. Enjoying custody of her son, she had a comfortable home and the security of a marriage, but remained troubled. She drank heavily and was found dead by her husband in their home on August 24, 1965.

  The circumstances of her death were odd—she was naked in bed, with two empty quart-sized bottles of vodka resting near her head. A loaded, cocked .22 rifle was at her feet—unfired. And her nude body was covered with bruises, as if she’d been beaten to death.

  Her husband explained this by saying, “She was always falling down.” And the Deputy Coroner termed her cause of death as acute alcoholism.

  I guess if Walter Overell dynamited himself to death, anything is possible.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Fact, speculation and fiction are freely mixed within this story, which is based on an actual case and uses the real names of the involved parties, with the exception of Heller and his partner Fred Rubinski (the latter a fictionalization of real-life private eye, Barney Ruditsky). I would like to acknowledge the following works, which were used as reference: The California Crime Book (1971), Robert Colby; For the Life of Me (1954), Jim Richardson; “Reporters” (1991), Will Fowler; and the Federal Writers’ Project California guide.

  The Sunset Strip—the center of Hollywood’s nightlife—lay near the heart of Los Angeles, or would have if L.A. had a heart. I’m not waxing poetic, either: postwar L.A. (circa late summer 1949) sprawled over some 452 square miles, but isolated strips of land within the city limits were nonetheless not part of the city. Sunset Boulevard itself ran from downtown to the ocean, around twenty-five miles; west on Sunset, toward Beverly Hills—roughly a mile and a half, from Crescent Heights Boulevard to Doheny Drive—the Strip threaded through an unincorporated area surrounded by (but not officially part of) the City of Angels.

  Prime nightspots like the Trocadero, Ciro’s, the Mocambo, and the Crescendo shared the glittering Strip with smaller, hipper clubs and hideaway restaurants like Slapsy Maxie’s, the Little New Yorker and the Band Box. Seediness and glamour intermingled, grit met glitz, as screen legends, power brokers and gangsters converged in West Hollywood for a free-spirited, no-holds-barred good time.

  The L.A. police couldn’t even make an arrest on the Strip, which was under the jurisdiction of County Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz, who cheerfully ignored both the city’s cops and its ordinances. Not that the L.A. coppers would have made any more arrests than the sheriff’s deputies: the Vice Squad was well-known to operate chiefly as a shakedown racket. A mighty bookmaking operation was centered on the Sunset Strip, and juice was paid to both the county sheriff and the city vice squad. This seemed unfair to Mickey Cohen.

  The diminutive, dapper, vaguely simian Cohen was a former Ben “Bugsy” Siegel associate who had built his bookie empire on the bodies of his competitors. Rivals with such colorful names as Maxie Shaman, Benny “the Meatball” Gambino, and Tony Trombino were just a few of the violently deceased gangsters who had unwillingly made way for Mickey; and the Godfather of Southern California—Jack Dragna—could only grin and bear it and put up with Cohen’s bloody empire building. Cohen had the blessing of the east coast Combination—Luciano, Meyer Lanksy, the late Siegel’s crowd—and oldtime Prohibition-era mob boss Dragna didn’t like it. A West Coast mob war had been brewing for years.

  I knew Cohen from Chicago, where in the late thirties he was strictly a smalltime gambler and general-purpose hoodlum. Our paths had crossed several times since—never in a nasty way—and I rather liked the street-smart, stupid-looking Mick. He was nothing if not colorful: owned dozens of suits, wore monogrammed silk shirts and made-to-order shoes, drove a $15,000 custom-built blue Caddy, lived with his pretty little wife in a $150,000 home in classy Brentwood, and suffered a cleanliness fetish that had him washing his hands more than Lady MacBeth.

  A fixture of the Sunset Strip, Mick strutted through clubs spreading dough around like advertising leafle
ts. One of his primary hangouts was Sherry’s, a cocktail lounge slash restaurant, a favorite film-colony rendezvous whose nondescript brick exterior was offset by an ornate interior.

  My business partner Fred Rubinski was co-owner of Sherry’s. Fireplug Fred—who resembled a slightly better-looking Edward G. Robinson—was an ex-Chicago cop who had moved out here before the war to open a detective agency. We’d known each other in Chicago, both veterans of the pickpocket detail, and I too had left the Windy City PD to go private, only I hadn’t gone west, young man.

  At least, not until after the war. The A-1 Detective Agency—of which I, Nathan Heller, was president—had (over the course of a decade-and-change) grown from a one-man hole-in-the-wall affair over a deli on Van Buren to a suite of offices in the Monadnock Building rife with operatives, secretaries and clients. Expansion seemed the thing, and I convinced my old pal Fred to throw in with me. So, starting in late ’46, the Los Angeles branch operated out of the Bradbury Building at Third and Broadway, with Fred—now vice president of the A-1—in charge, while I of course kept the Chicago offices going. Only it seemed, more and more, I was spending time in California. My wife was an actress, and she had moved out here with our infant son, after the marriage went quickly south. The divorce wasn’t final yet, and in my weaker moments, I still had hopes of patching things up, and was looking at finding an apartment or small house to rent, so I could divide my time between L.A. and Chicago. In July of ’49, however, I was in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, for whom the A-1 handled occasional security matters, an arrangement which included the perk of free lodgings.

  Like Cohen, Fred Rubinski attempted to make up for his homeliness with natty attire, such as the blue suit with gray pinstripes and the gray-and-white silk tie he wore, as he sat behind his desk in his Bradbury Building office, a poolcue Havana shifting from corner to corner of his thick lips.

  “Just do it as a favor to me, Nate,” Fred said.

  I was seated across from him, in the client chair, ankle on a knee. “You don’t do jobs for Cohen—why should I?”

  Fred patted the air with his palms; blue cigar smoke swirled around him like a wreath. “You don’t have to do a job for him—just hear him out. He’s a good customer at Sherry’s and I don’t wanna cross him.”

  “You also don’t want to do jobs for him.”

  A window air conditioner was chugging; hot day. Fred and I had to speak up over it.

  “I use the excuse that I’m too well-known out here,” my partner said. “Also, the Mickster and me are already considered to be cronies, ’cause of Sherry’s. He knows the cops would use that as an excuse to come down on me, hard, if suddenly I was on Mickey Cohen’s retainer.”

  “But you’re not asking me to do this job.”

  “No. Absolutely not. Hell, I don’t even know what it is.”

  “You can guess.”

  “Well…I suppose you know he’s been kind of a clay pigeon, lately. Several attempts on his life, probably by Dragna’s people…. Mick probably wants a bodyguard.”

  “I don’t do that kind of work anymore. Anyway, what about those Seven Dwarfs of his?”

  That was how Cohen’s inner circle of lieutenants/strong-arms were known—Neddie Herbert, Davy Ogul, Frank Niccoli, Johnny Stompanato, Al Snyder, Jimmy Rist, and the late Hooky Rothman, who about a year ago had got his face shot off when guys with shotguns came barging right into Cohen’s clothing shop. I liked my face right where it was.

  “Maybe it’s not a bodyguard job,” Fred said with a shrug. “Maybe he wants you for something else.”

  I shifted in the chair. “Fred, I’m trying to distance myself from these mobsters. My connections with the Outfit back home, I’m still trying to live down—it’s not good for the A-1…”

  “Tell him! Just don’t insult the man…don’t piss him off.”

  I got up, smoothing out my suit. “Fred, I was raised right. I hardly ever insult homicidal gangsters.”

  “You’ve killed a few, though.”

  “Yeah,” I said from the doorway, “but I didn’t insult them.”

  The habidashery known poshly as Michael’s was a two-story brick building in the midst of boutiques and nighteries at 8804 Sunset Boulevard. I was wearing a tan tropical worsted sportcoat and brown summer slacks, with a rust-color tie and two-tone Florsheims, an ensemble that had chewed up a hundred bucks in Marshall Field’s men’s department, and spit out pocket change. But the going rates inside this plush shop made me look like a piker.

  Within the highly polished walnut walls, a few ties lay on a central glass counter, sporting silky sheens and twenty-five buck price tags. A rack of sportshirts ran seventy-five per, a stack of dress shirts ran in the hundred range. A luxurious brown robe on a headless manikin—a memorial to Hooky Rothman?—cost a mere two-hundred bucks, and the sportcoats went for two-hundred up, the suits three to four. Labels boasted: “Tailored Exclusively for Mickey Cohen.”

  A mousy little clerk—a legit-looking joker with a wispy mustache, wearing around five cee’s worth of this stuff—looked at me as if a hobo had wandered into the shop.

  “May I help you?” he asked, stuffing more condescension into four words than I would have thought humanly possible.

  “Tell your boss Nate Heller’s here,” I said casually, as I poked around at the merchandise.

  This was not a front for a bookmaking joint: Cohen really did run a high-end clothing store; but he also supervised his other, bigger business—which was extracting protection money from bookmakers, reportedly $250 per week per phone—out of here, as well. Something in my manner told the effete clerk that I was part of the backroom business, and his patronizing manner disappeared.

  His whispered-into-a-phone conversation included my name, and soon he was politely ushering me o thee rear of the store, opening a steel-plated door, gesturing me into a walnut-paneled, expensively-appointed office.

  Mayer Harris Cohen—impeccably attired in a double-breasted light gray suit, with a gray and green paisley silk tie—sat behind a massive mahogany desk whose glass-topped surface bore three phones, a small clock with pen-and-pencil holder, a vase with cut flowers, a notepad and no other sign of work. Looming over him was an ornately framed hand-colored photograph of FDR at his own desk, cigarette holder at a jaunty angle.

  Standing on either side, like Brillcreamed bookends, were two of Cohen’s dark-eyed Dwarfs: Johnny Stompanato, a matinee-idol handsome hood who I knew a little; and hook-nosed Frank Niccoli, who I knew even less. They were as well-dressed as their boss.

  “Thanks for droppin’ by, Nate,” Cohen said, affably, not rising. His thinning black hair was combed close to his egg-shaped skull; with his broad forehead, blunt nose and pugnacious chin, the pint-sized gangster resembled a bull terrier.

  “Pleasure, Mickey,” I said, hat in my hands.

  Cohen’s dark eyes flashed from bodyguard to bodyguard. “Fellas, some privacy?”

  The two nodded at their boss, but each stopped—one at a time—to acknowledge me, as they headed to a side door, to an adjacent room (not into the shop).

  “Semper fi, Mac,” Stompanato said, flashing his movie-star choppers. He always said this to me, since we were both ex-Marines.

  “Semper fi,” I said.

  Niccoli stopped in front of me and smiled, but it seemed forced. “No hard feelings, Heller.”

  “About what?”

  “You know. No hard feelings. It was over between us, anyway.”

  “Frank, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  His hard, pockmarked puss puckered into an expression that, accompanied by a dismissive wave, implied “no big deal.”

  When the bodyguards were gone, Cohen gestured for me to sit on the couch against the wall, opposite his desk. He rose to his full five six, and went to a console radio against the wall and switched it on—Frankie Laine was singing “Mule Train”…loud. Then Cohen trundled over and sat next to me, saying quietly, barely audible with the blaring r
adio going, “You can take Frankie at his word.”

  At first I thought he was talking about Frankie Laine, then I realized he meant Niccoli.

  “Mick,” I said, whispering back, not knowing why but following his lead, “I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.”

  Cohen’s eyes were wide—he almost always had a startled deer look. “You’re dating Didi Davis, right?”

  Didi was a starlet I was seeing, casually; I might have been trying to patch up my marriage, but I wasn’t denying myself the simple pleasures.

  “Yeah, I met her a couple weeks ago at Sherry’s.”

  “Well, Nate, she used to be Frankie’s girl.”

  Cohen smelled like a barber shop got out of hand—reeking heavily of talcum powder and cologne, which seemed a misnomer considering his perpetual five o’clock shadow.

  “I didn’t know that, Mick. She didn’t say anything….”

  A whip cracked on the radio, as “Mule Train” wound down.

  Cohen shrugged. “It’s over. She got tired of gettin’ slapped around, I guess. Anyway, if Frankie says he don’t hold no grudge, he don’t hold no grudge.”

  “Well, that’s just peachy.” I hated it when girls forgot to mention their last boyfriend was a hoodlum.

  Vaughn Monroe was singing “Ghost Riders in the Sky” on the radio—in full nasal throttle. And we were still whispering.

  Cohen shifted his weight. “Listen, you and me, we never had no problems, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And you know your partner, Fred and me, we’re pals.”

  “Sure.”

  “So I figured I’d throw some work your way.”

  “Like what, Mick?”

  He was sitting sideways on the couch, to look at me better; his hands were on his knees. “I’m gettin’ squeezed by a pair of vice cops—Delbert Potts and Rudy Johnson, fuckers’ names. They been tryin’ to sell me recordings.”

  “Frankie Laine? Vaughn Monroe?”