We were on the third floor. It was after visiting hours and the corridor was dark; what little light there was reflected off the shining waxed hardwood floor. An occasional nurse or doctor drifted by, faceless in the dimness. Ricca was walking quickly, his steps echoing, and sick people in their white beds and dark rooms glimpsed at left and right made a sort of morbid, moving and occasionally moaning tapestry. I kept up with Ricca, but stayed behind him, following like a kid being led to the principal’s office by a strict and pissed-off teacher.
Then we went around a comer and moved away from hospital rooms into what seemed to be an administrative area. At a door marked Dr. Gaetano Ronga, Ricca knocked; his lips were pursed with quiet annoyance.
“Yes?” said a confident male voice from within.
“It’s Paul,” he said. “Your package is here.”
“Send him in,” the voice said.
And Ricca, for once, did wait on me: he opened the door. The look on his face was glazed and quietly contemptuous. I went on by him, into the room, and the door shut behind me. Ricca had not followed.
In a medium-size office, filled with dark wood filing cabinets, its walls hung with diplomas, family pictures and prints of flying fowl, behind a big desk on which various manila folders were neatly arranged, sat Frank Nitti.
“Nate Heller,” Nitti said, with a generous gesture of one hand and a smile, but not getting up, “sit down. Nice to see you again. Thanks for comin’ around.”
“My pleasure, Mr. Nitti,” I said, finding a hardwood chair and sitting across from him.
“You know better than that,” he said, mock-scoldingly. “It’s ‘Frank’ and it’s ‘Nate.’ Right?”
“Right,” I said. We were old friends, after all; ask anybody.
Nitti was a small, well-groomed man in his early fifties, damn near handsome, his face flecked with scar tissue here and there, his lower lip particularly. His hair was slicked back, dark with a little gray, and very neat; he was a former barber and fussy about his appearance. He seemed uncharacteristically casual in dress tonight, a white shirt open at the collar, sleeves rolled up.
“I hope you’re well, Frank,” I said.
“Just in for a checkup. Ever since Cermak’s sons of bitches pumped that lead in me, I gotta come in all the time and get this and that checked.” He shrugged dismissively, but I’d heard about his bleeding ulcers and back problems. “I take these physicals at night. It’s more private that way. So. How’s business, Heller?”
“Not bad. Little divorce work. Some retail credit accounts.”
“I see in the paper you picked up a client out east.”
I figured that was it. Davis’s story about me working for Governor Hoffman on the Lindbergh case was undoubtedly all over the evening edition of the News.
“Yeah,” I said. “Hell of a thing. Governor of New Jersey, no less.”
“You worked the Lindbergh case as a cop, didn’t you? Back in ’32?”
“I was the Chicago police liaison, yes. I was just on the fringes. No big deal.”
“That was when Al said he could get Little Lindy back. Right?”
“Uh, right, Frank.” Where the hell was this going?
Nitti folded his hands; he looked strangely thoughtful. “I’d like you to do a job for me, while you’re out there.”
“A job?”
He shrugged. “Nothing hard. Just, if you turn anything up that would be of interest to me, I want you to let me know.”
“Of interest to you…?”
He looked at me pointedly. “Heller, don’t make me spell it out.”
I wasn’t “Nate” anymore, I noticed.
“Okay,” I said tentatively. “But I’m not quite following you.”
He lifted a hand and one finger of that hand. “If this thing comes back to Chicago…if it comes back to the Outfit…I want to be the first to know.”
I shifted uncomfortably in the chair. “Frank, maybe I better call Governor Hoffman and just back out of this thing. I don’t want to be put in a position where I’m working at cross-purposes for two clients.”
Nitti stood and I damn near jumped. He walked past me to the door and opened it. Ricca was waiting out there, across the hail, a sentry in a tailored topcoat.
“Paul,” he said, gently. “See if you can find me a glass of milk.”
Ricca nodded and disappeared and Nitti shut the door.
He began to pace, saying, “You know, I was the first of the boys to take a tax-rap fall. They got me before they got Al, you know.”
I nodded.
“I hadn’t been outside so very long, when they put Al away. While I was gone, Al moved the Waiter up in my place—temporarily of course.”
I said nothing.
He stopped pacing, stood before me. He was not a big man; and he was slender. But his presence was towering. He said, “A1 and the Waiter always been tight. They got tighter when I was away. I feel they could be…reckless, at times. One thing you know about me, Heller, is I don’t like attracting the heat. If something has to be done, then you do it in such a way it don’t come back to your doorstep.”
What Nitti was talking about was his disagreement with Capone over such PR catastrophes as the shooting of reporter Jake Lingle and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Not that Nitti was nonviolent. But Nitti was a master manipulator, a cunning impresario of events. When he took Cermak out, it looked political; when he got rid of John Dillinger, it was the feds who took the rap. Just last month, “Machine-Gun” Jack McGurn—longtime Outfit guy who’d reportedly gone disloyal—was gunned down in a bowling alley, on St. Valentine’s Day. The hitters left a comic valentine on the corpse, leading the cops and press to assume that this was some long-overdue revenge upon McGurn by remnants of the old Bugs Moran gang for McGurn’s role in the famed Clark Street massacre seven years before. To me the slaying had Nitti’s chess-master fingerprints all over it.
“I think Al and the Waiter may have done this Lindbergh thing,” he said. Shrugged. ‘That is, had it done, through their East-Coast contacts. Ricca spent as much time out there as he did Chicago, in those days; he was Al’s contact with Luciano and Gordon and Schultz and the rest.”
I didn’t know if I liked hearing Nitti talk this openly. But I didn’t seem to have any other choice than to listen.
“If Al did this—had this done—to try and buy himself out of stir, I want to know.”
“Wouldn’t you have been…consulted?”
“Jesus, Heller! Are you kidding? You think I’d let them pull a crazy fucking stunt like that? It would’ve been from Capone’s lips to Ricca’s ear. I don’t know for sure that they did it, understand. It’s rumor. It’s just…what you say, supposition, on my part.”
“Capone always claimed a former employee of his, name of Bob Conroy, pulled the job.”
“Conroy was Al’s man. No former about it.”
“I don’t think the feds ever found Conroy.”
Nitti winced with amusement. “Oh sure, they did. Frank Wilson himself, workin’ with that New York dick Finn, turned Conroy up, in August of ’32.”
“Really? I never heard about it.”
Nitti shrugged. “Didn’t make the papers out here. Nobody picked up on the Chicago angle. Conroy was found in a rundown back-room apartment he’d been hiding out in on West Hundred and Fourth in New York. Him and his pretty blonde wife. Double suicide, they called it.”
“Jesus.”
“There was a beer war that broke out, right about the time the body of the Lindbergh kid turned up. A lot of people in the bootlegging business was dropping like flies out on the East Coast. Waxey Gordon and Dutch Schultz was going at it. Ever hear of a pair called Max Hassel and Max Greenberg?”
“I don’t believe so,” I said.
“They were so-called victims in that war. So were half a dozen of their associates, over a period of six months or so. Could Al, through the Waiter, been tying up some loose East-Coast ends? If bootleggers were recruited to
snatch the kid, that would make sense.”
I could only nod.
Another sharp rapping made me squirm in my chair.
“’Cusa,” Nitti said. He went to the door, where Ricca was holding a glass of milk. Seeing Ricca like that, his face as white as the milk though considerably less wholesome, would have been amusing if it hadn’t been so frightening.
“Paul,” Nitti said with a smile, taking the milk, “thank you. Would you find my father-in-law, please, and tell him I’m ready for him.”
And Ricca, with an almost imperceptible disgruntled sigh, again disappeared. Nitti shut the door and turned to smile at me like a kindly priest.
“The Waiter is very disciplined,” he said, setting the milk on the desk. “And very loyal…to Al. In two, three years, Al will be out of stir. Meantime, I have the Waiter coming up under me, undermining my authority in little ways. Challenging me in board meetings…”
He trailed off, knowing that he should say no more on this subject. He went over and sipped the milk; set it back down.
But there were things I needed to know. “Frank, how does the Lindbergh case figure into any of this?”
He sat on the edge of the desk, at once casual and tightly coiled. “Couple ways, Nate.”
“Nate” again.
“If I knew the Waiter and Al did this thing,” he said, “it would be valuable knowledge. Something I would have over them.”
“Would you expect me to…cover up, or withhold evidence or information from the authorities?”
“If I asked you to,” he said, “wouldn’t you?”
I sighed. “I’d rather not take the job, then. I’m already getting a reputation for being connected. It’s not necessarily good for my business.”
He shrugged. “I might throw more work your way. Put you on a nice yearly retainer.”
“No offense, Frank, but I’m just enough of an ex-cop to want to keep some distance from your business.”
He gestured with both hands in a “fair enough” manner. “Then all I ask is that you tell me what you find out. Then it’s up to me to either use it, or contain it, best I can. I don’t expect you to do anything but, on the one hand, serve your client, Governor Who’s-It; and on the other, keep me informed.”
He slid off the desk. He dipped a hand into his pocket and withdrew a thick money clip; a fifty-dollar bill was on top. He unclipped the bills and counted out ten fifties.
“Five hundred as a retainer,” he said. “With a bonus, if you find something useful to me.”
“Okay, Frank,” I said. I took the money.
“Honest to God, kid,” he said, “I don’t know if Al was crazy enough to do this thing. But I know the Waiter is ruthless enough. He’s made a lot of people disappear in his time.”
I couldn’t hold the anger back. “Then why the hell did you have him, of all people, bring me here? Do you want him to figure out why you hired me? He’s obviously insulted at playing chauffeur to the likes of me…”
Nitti placed a fatherly hand on my shoulder and bestowed me a cool smile. “If you get close to something the Waiter’s involved in out east, he’s gonna know, anyway. He’s gonna know immediately.”
“Right!”
“So I had him bring you here. To send him a message.”
“What message is that?”
“Not to kill you, Nate.”
I just looked at him.
“I want Paul to know that you’re under my protection. He touches you, he answers to me. Capeesh?”
I swallowed and nodded.
There was another knock on the door.
“Ah,” Nitti said cheerfully. “There’s Paul with my father-in-law. Time for my checkup, and your ride home.”
27
My new client, Governor Hoffman—or to be more exact, the State of New Jersey—wired me enough for a Pullman sleeper compartment, but I bought an upper berth instead and made an extra twenty bucks and change on the deal. It was the Twentieth Century Limited, that fabled fancy streamliner, which would shoot me nonstop overnight to New York, where shortly after an onboard breakfast I’d grab a less sleek train and backtrack to Trenton.
Before retiring, however, I spent some time in the dining car—the prime rib was not as good as the roast beef at the Stockyard’s Inn, but the meal was on the State of New Jersey, so what the hell. Later I loitered in the lounge car, which was all chrome and mirrors and diffused lighting and, thankfully, liquor. It would have been nice to run into a beautiful lonely woman traveling alone; but I didn’t. I figured a couple Bacardi cocktails would help me get over it, or anyway sleep better; but they didn’t.
Even the lulling lurch of the Limited and the soothing blackness of the Pullman berth didn’t put me to sleep. My mind was moving faster than the train. Partly it was worry—thinking about Nitti and Ricca and where I might end up if Ricca deposed Nitti, at some point, like tomorrow.
But mostly I was carried back to a similar trip I’d taken on the taxpayers of New Jersey, not that much over a year before, in January of ’35. I’d gone the upper-berth route that time, too—meaning I’d bilked New Jersey a little better than forty bucks on train rides alone. And they paid for a night’s lodging—the Union Hotel in Flemington, where the trial was held—plus thirty-five bucks per diem, which added up.
A certain irony was not lost on me. Last year, the State of New Jersey had paid me, generously, to help put Hauptmann in the electric chair. This year, the State of New Jersey was treating me with like generosity to help keep Bruno from sitting down.
And the state had certainly spared no expense in the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, even when it came to shipping in a minor witness like me from Chicago. And why not? It had been one hell of a show—a regular Broadway production, even if it had been mounted in a one-horse town.
Flemington, sixty-some miles from New York, was a roost for chicken-and-egg farmers, a village of less than three thousand Lums and Abners in the rolling hills of Hunterdon County, home of the Lindbergh estate. The little county seat suddenly had a big trial in its lap, and by New Year’s Day had become host to sixty thousand “foreigners”—sightseers, reporters, telephone and telegraph technicians, swarming Main Street, clogging the roads all the way back to New York and Philadelphia.
The courthouse was a stately two-and-a-half-story whitewashed stucco affair with four big pillars out front and a small, modern jail building in back. In that smaller building resided the illegal alien Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Around Christmas some compassionate locals had sung him carols outside his barred window; lately, tourists had been repeating less cheery chants, among them “Burn the kraut!” and “Kill Hauptmann!”
Hauptmann, arrested in the Bronx, had been extradited to New Jersey because in New York the only crime he could be tried for was extortion: in Jersey, he could be tried for kidnapping and murder. Attorney General David Wilentz, by defining the kidnapping as a “burglary”—hadn’t the kidnapper broken and entered, and “stolen” the child away?—could in that convoluted fashion charge Hauptmann with murder. Burglary was a felony, and any killing during the commission of a felony, whether that death was accidental or intentional, was of course murder. Kidnapping could have brought a sentence of as little as five years. Wilentz and the world wanted a death sentence for Hauptmann.
From what I’d read in the papers, Hauptmann probably deserved it, though this “lone-wolf kidnapper” stuff never rang true to me. I said as much to Colonel Henry Breckinridge, who picked me up early that morning at Grand Central Station and with me made the incredibly slow journey (with snow-narrowed roads and impossible traffic, at times three miles an hour) to the Flemington courthouse.
“I can’t say I buy that theory, either,” Breckinridge said guardedly, studying the bumper of the buggy in front of him like a legal brief he was considering. “But my understanding is, Wilentz hasn’t the right sort of evidence to prove a conspiracy, so…”
“They’re targeting the guy they have,” I said, shrugging, “
using what evidence they do have. Makes sense. Have you testified yet?”
“No. But I will. It’s early yet. This is only the fifth day.”
“I saw in the papers that Wilentz put the Lindberghs on the stand, first.”
“Yes.”
Breckinridge seemed vaguely troubled.
“Must’ve been hard on Anne,” I said.
He nodded gravely. “She stood up well. When the prosecutor handed her the little garments to identify…it was a tragic goddamn thing, Heller. Count yourself lucky you didn’t have to witness it.”
I nodded back noncommittally. “How did Slim do?”
“Fine.” He turned his eyes quickly away from the road. “Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering,” I said. “I understand he’s attending the trial, each day.”
“Yes, he is.”
“What, is he staying over at Englewood?”
“That’s correct. He and Anne both, though she hasn’t returned to court, and has sense enough not to.”
“Colonel, what’s bothering you?”
“Why, nothing.”
“What, you don’t think it’s unfair to the defendant, do you, for a martyred public figure like Lindy to be sitting in court? Where the jury can see him all the time?”
Breckinridge shook his head, no, but it wasn’t very convincing. He was Slim’s friend, but he was also a fair man, and a lawyer. And I knew, from what I’d read, that other aspects of Slim’s performance on the stand might bother Breckinridge, as well.
For one thing, Slim had denied using his political influence to have federal officers “lay off” certain aspects of the case; and for another, he had denied that he ever expressed the opinion that a “gang,” as opposed to a single-o like Hauptmann, had kidnapped his son.
These were minor lies, even mere shadings of the truth you might say; no big deal. However…
Lindbergh had also, on the stand, without hesitation, positively identified Hauptmann as the man in St. Raymond’s Cemetery. Strictly on the basis of recognizing his voice. He had, after all, heard “Cemetery John” shout, “Hey, Doctor!”
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