“I’ve not talked to Jarry, except at the beach on Labor Day. He wasn’t wearing a wire and we didn’t talk about the Exchange.”
“I know that, too. It’s all fake. He’s taped some kind of baloney. That’s why we will win. But it will take time and effort.”
“What kind of a woman is she? Why will she buy something that Jarry has cooked up?”
“She’s not a very good lawyer, Dermot. She’s dangerous because she’s not like the other people over there, Derm. For her it’s not just a game. She’s a true believer.”
“What do you mean?”
“Most of the other assistant prosecutors, either there or out at 26th and California are playing a game. All right, they might bankrupt an innocent person, ruin his life, suborn perjury, and force a plea bargain on him because they have bottomless pockets and he doesn’t—the way their buddies in Washington did to Danny Rostenkowski—but they’re not on any personal moral crusade. They add the scalp of a celebrity to their belt and it means a better job in a law firm when they switch sides so they can make some money. That’s what lawyers do. Dale, however, was brainwashed by the nuns where she went to college. She’s determined to eliminate evil and corruption from the world, especially white male evil and corruption. She was a good person, honest, upright, fair until her husband, who was a jerk, left her. Since then she’s left the rest of her religion behind and is sleeping with her boss, but she’s still on her campaign to send bad people to jail.”
“And I’m a white male bad person.”
“A white male bad commodity broker … Don’t worry about her, Derm. We’ll beat her and probably go after her for malicious prosecution. Maybe get her disbarred. I hope so. But I’m sorry it has to happen at this point in your life.”
“We’ll be all right, Cindy.”
“I know you will.”
I would have to tell herself at supper. How would she react to the news?
She’d don her Grace O’alley persona. Poor Dale Quade.
“When will this go down?” I asked Cindy.
“She’s on a fishing expedition and will be in no hurry. They’ll go over your papers looking for something, anything, which will confirm whatever they have from Jarry’s wire. Unless something happens, it’ll take months before she goes to a grand jury. She’s in no hurry and she’s got unlimited funds, like they always do. They spent twelve million dollars putting Rosty in jail for giving away rocking chairs.”
“So I live under a cloud … Will there really be an indictment?”
“I hate to say it, Dermot, but I think so. Maybe the United States Attorney, whom she has burned a couple of times by her zeal, won’t think there’s enough for an indictment. Maybe the Justice Department will veto it. Maybe she’ll go after some other victim. But she’s got this phony interview with you from Jarry’s wire. Don’t worry. Unless we’re very unlucky in the judge we end up with, we’ll get the charges dismissed. Then we go after her to get her disbarred. There’s a lot of people who would like that.”
I was not reassured, but I thanked my sister. I already had had one fight with an ambitious prosecutor and a stupid judge who wanted to send Nuala home as an “illegal alien.” I did not want another tangle with a justice system which had become corrupt. I was a young man about to marry a wife; I had paid my taxes; now my government was trying to make my life miserable.
The phone rang again. Father Leo.
“I talked to a priest who was with Joe Curran after I was. He said he remembered a handsome woman, maybe in her late forties, who came to see him about the time Kennedy was assassinated. Dressed in black and weeping. Talked to Joe a long time in the office. Joe wasn’t himself for days. Ring any bells?”
“It might, Father. Thanks a lot. I’ll stay in touch.” I was about to leave my apartment for my appointment with Tim McCarthy when Nuala was back on the phone.
“Dermot Coyne.”
“Isn’t me eejit brother making trouble again?”
Not a good morning.
“What now?”
“Hasn’t he flown all the way to Boston and himself upsetting me brother Pedar?”
“Pedar called you?”
“He’s a good soul, Dermot Michael, not like Laurence at all. Pedar’s a lot like me da, though he doesn’t laugh as much. Laurence told him that you were shiftless and lazy and didn’t have an office or a job and that your family lived in neighborhood filled with Negroes. He said the family had to intervene to protect me.”
“Does Pedar agree?”
“He doesn’t know what to think. He told me that he’d never seen Laurence so upset.”
“And you told him.”
“I told him that I didn’t give a good shite what the family thought and that I was going to marry you no matter what they did and that the whole lot of them could go to hell as far as I was concerned.”
“Nuala Anne!”
“I lost it, Derm, I lost it altogether.”
“That won’t help.”
“It helped me … Dermot, you have a lot of money and are very generous with it, but that’s not the point.”
“And the point is?”
“That I’d marry you if you didn’t have a penny and I had to support you for the rest of me life with me singing.”
My shy child was crying. I clenched my fist. I would settle with Laurence McGrail.
“That’s a grand idea,” I said. “I’ll never write another word.”
Her tears turned to a giggle.
“He’ll try to spoil everything.” She sighed.
“Did you tell Pedar that I was sending a statement of my net worth?”
“I did NOT! I don’t care! FOCKMALL!”
More tears.
“Should I talk to Pedar in a day or two?”
“That’d be super, Derm. He’s such a nice man.”
“See you tonight.”
“Thanks for listening to a hysterical woman.”
“Who interrupts me when I’m at work.”
“Go long wid ya!”
What will happen, I wondered, when Laurence finds out that I’m about to be indicted for fraud.
I encountered my neighbor Mike Casey on the elevator.
“Annie and I are looking forward to the wedding,” he said.
Mike, who Nuala says looks like Sean Connery, is an artist and a former police superintendent. He and his wife own a fashionable gallery over on Oak Street. He also presides over Reliable Security, an organization which enables moonlighting cops to do what they would do on the job if they were not busy filling out forms.
“If there is one,” I said glumly.
I told him about Dale Quade’s investigation.
His steel blue eyes flickered.
“Tell you what, Derm: Let me talk to a few people and see what the wicked witch is up to this time. I’ll also ask around about this Jarry Kennedy punk. He’s got a reputation.”
“Fine.”
“Stay in touch,” he said, as we left the elevator.
Outside it was another glorious late-September day, soft, mellow and peaceful. It challenged my somber mood and lost.
I crossed Michigan Avenue, walked a block to the Water Tower Park, and turned a half block to the right. Lewis Towers, the downtown center of Loyola University, was a nineteen-twenties skyscraper, the only old building left around the Water Tower square except the Tower itself.
Professor McCarthy, a tall, elegant man with silver hair and a black mustache, was waiting for me in his office. In shirtsleeves and suspenders he looked more like a witty bartender than an academic. A genial and popular teacher, Timothy McCarthy had produced solid work on the history of Chicago and had been engaged for ten years in a definitive history of Chicago crime.
“Nice to meet you, Dermot,” he said, as he rose to shake hands with me. “I like your stories. You’re an authentic seanachie.”
“Irish-American variety,” I said.
He laughed. “Nothing wrong with that.”
He
moved a stack of books off a chair and pointed at it.
“Typical professor’s office I guess. Still, you can’t beat the view. A cup of tea?”
“I’ll never say no to that.”
His view revealed the Water Tower, the ugly Museum of Contemporary Art (it looked like a fortress on the Siegfried line) and the Lake beyond.
Tim McCarthy was a nice man. I felt guilty because I intended to play a bit of a trick on him.
“Black?”
“Like I said, I’m Irish-American. My fiancée is from the West. She says that only savages drink tea without milk.”
“Irish-speaking?”
“She sure is.”
“Congratulations to both of you.”
“Thank you.”
He poured the tea, from a pot on a warmer (which herself would have thought sacrilegious) into a maroon Loyola University mug.
“So you’re thinking of writing a novel about Al Capone?”
“Sort of turning the idea over in my head. He was a brute, but an interesting brute.”
“All of that,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “You have to understand that he took over from Johnny Torrio in 1925 when Johnny had enough of the violence and danger and by 1930 was already under indictment by the feds. He ran the Outfit for only five years and yet became a world celebrity in an era when that was a lot harder than it is now and without any PR assistance at that. He was the first Chicago celebrity. All over the world, his name became synonymous for Chicago.”
“Until Michael came along … How did he do it?”
“Style mostly. He wore elegant clothes and talked a fascinating line. He was just a businessman, providing the public with something they wanted. He deplored the violence which Prohibition caused and denounced the corruption of law enforcement. He probably half believed what he said, more than half when he saw how eagerly the press bought it. He was right about the corruption, you know. He and his allies spent a million dollars a week on bribes. Government paid its Prohibition agents $2500 a year, the Outfit paid them a thousand dollars a week. Chicago was wide-open. The bootleggers’ problem was not finding customers, so much as finding and making the product.”
“Did he enjoy killing?”
Professor McCarthy twisted on his chair.
“He had a terrible temper. He never hesitated to remove someone who got in his way. So he and Torrio called in Frankie Yale from Brooklyn, where Capone was born, to dispose of Big Jim Colosimo, who had been head of the outfit and stood in the way of expansion of the bootlegger trade. Later he returned the favor by eliminating one of Yale’s Irish rivals. Still later he had Yale eliminated because he found out that he was scheming to do the same to him. His two favorite gunmen were Al Anselmi and John Scalise—they did the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. He found out that they were turning against him and he beat them to death with a sawed-off baseball bat after a big dinner in their honor. I’m sure he enjoyed getting those who were plotting to get him.”
“Nice man.”
“In principle, however, he deplored the violence because it was bad for business. He thought of himself as a businessman and not a crook. He once said, ‘I can’t change conditions. I just meet them without backing up.’”
“A solid business principle.”
“You have to understand, Dermot, that Chicago was a lawless town from the very beginning. It grew too quickly for the law to catch up. It was a raw frontier town like those you see in the movies, but before anyone knew it there were a million and then two million people here and it was the busiest port in the world and the railroad center of the country. The police and the government were always corrupt. Criminals always flourished. Reformers never had the votes, not for more than one election. The tide has turned against crime and corruption only in this century and only since the election of the first Mayor Daley. Even he had to tolerate a lot of stuff that he didn’t like.”
“Worse than the other big cities?”
“New York is probably worse. In Chicago, however, it has always been more open. Gangs fought one another for turf from the beginning of the city. Extortion, vice, gambling were their cut of the expanding city. Capone and Torrio’s contribution was to attempt to organize it to, ‘systematize’ it, to use their word, from an Italian word which meant what our professors of business administration mean when they say ‘rationalize.’ Capone tried to ‘restructure’ crime in Chicago. His principle was that there was enough money for everyone, so why kill one another? He failed to convince the others for very long. Hence the killings and especially the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre. The men who took over while he was in Alcatraz and his brain was deteriorating were more successful. Crime in Chicago is mostly ‘systematized,’ though even today there are still gang wars. Nothing like the battles between Capone and Bugs Moran or Sweet Rolls Sullivan.”
“Why did Capone fail to persuade them to lay off the killing?”
“Most of the bootleggers were punks, small-time racketeers and extortionists. They were too dumb to realize that there was indeed plenty of money for everyone and too greedy to pass up an opportunity to make an extra buck. Capone called meetings, everyone agreed to the division of territory he imposed, they all shook hands and promised lifelong friendship. The next thing you know they were shooting at each other again.”
He rose from his chair and refilled my teacup.
“So Scarface was more than a thug and a punk?”
“He was the first criminal businessman. He believed in finding the best possible resources and using them. He discovered the Thompson submachine gun, he bought the fastest cars and the largest trucks, he imported the best booze, he hired the most skillful killers. He also believed in planning. He organized everything. He even planned murders carefully. None of this pulling a gun on a rival in a speak. He’d order his guys to stake out sites in buildings, discover the victim’s regular routines, disguise themselves as cops, block the street with cars, and execute their victims quickly and cleanly, unless he thought they were traitors. So when Bugs Moran said after the St. Valentine’s Day massacre that only Capone killed that way, he wasn’t referring to the brutality but to the careful organization … Bugs was lucky he came to work late that day.”
“Just a businessman?”
“Look, Dermot, he was a crook and a killer, though maybe he was no worse than the Carnegies and the Rockefellers and the other business titans. My point is that he was a lot more than a crook and a killer. Beyond the boundaries of his ‘business’ he was a law-abiding citizen. He never killed a cop, he never resisted arrest, he was generous to charities, and acted like a good father, and by his lights, a good husband. Mae, his wife—and she was Irish-American by the way—was loyal to him to the bitter end. Al Capone was a complicated and very interesting man.”
“And the feds got him on tax evasion.”
“He had poor lawyers. Today a judge would have dismissed the charges.”
“What happened between him and Sweet Rolls?”
“You read my article?”
I nodded.
“It’s hard to figure out. Jimmy Sullivan knew there was enough money to go around and that there was no point in his fighting Capone. I think the Genna brothers out in Little Italy, real crazies, deliberately stirred up trouble by killing some of Jimmy’s guys and blaming Capone. Then Jimmy fought back and the war was on.”
“Like most wars, neither side really wanted it?”
“Capone especially. There was something just a little kinky about Sweet Rolls. He didn’t like to start the killing, but once he was into it, he seemed to enjoy the battle. Scarface never did that.”
“Yet Sullivan didn’t get Capone before Capone got him?”
Tim McCarthy shrugged his shoulders.
“That’s the biggest mystery of that whole decade. Jimmy was a decorated military officer, a brilliant tactician and wise strategist. Why did he wait there in his precious bakeshop for McGurn, Scalise, and Anselmi?”
“Machine Gun J
ack?”
“Actually McGurn normally used a thirty-eight …
Capone really admired Sweet Rolls. He knew that the Irishman was brighter, quicker, and more polished, even if he had almost no education. He didn’t want to put him down. Jimmy didn’t leave him much choice after that attack in front of the Lexington—ten cars with two tommy guns in each one of them. Somebody said it was like the battle of the Somme.”
“And just as successful.”
“Yeah … They say that Capone actually wept at Jimmy’s funeral.”
It was time to spring my trap.
“Even though he knew that Sullivan’s body wasn’t in the casket?”
McCarthy put down his teacup, sat up straight in his chair, and stared at me.
“What do you mean, Dermot?”
“I mean that we both know that the body of James ‘Sweet Rolls’ Sullivan is not in that grave out at Mount Carmel. His murder was a carefully staged act over which he and Scarface must have had quite a chuckle.”
He picked up a thick fountain pen from his desk and examined it carefully before he replied.
“I can’t comment on that, Dermot,” he said slowly, avoiding my eyes, but apparently not angry at my trick.
“You pulled a few punches in your article?”
“I may have. If I did, I had good reason … If I were you, I’d leave it alone. For a couple more years.”
“Till Marie is dead?”
“I didn’t say that.” He replaced the pen on the desk.
“You did say that Capone liked Sweet Rolls?”
“Respected him enormously.”
“Enough to do him a really big favor?”
He still would not look at me.
“If Al liked you and you were straight with him, there was no favor too big he’d not try to do for you.”
“I guess that answers my question.”
“Dermot,” he said with a rueful smile, “it’s a great story. It really is. You’re obviously a very good detective. But the story will keep. Our friends out on the West Side are men of honor in the sense that they keep their promises. The promise on this one will run out soon. The story will keep.”
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