Santo Trafficante was a no-nonsense man in his late forties, with almost as dark a tan as Giancana, who he was bigger than at five ten and maybe 180 pounds. The Tampa boss looked like an accountant in his black-rimmed glasses, with his bland features and high forehead and thinning black hair. He was conservatively attired-white short-sleeve shirt, black tie, black slacks. He might have been a waiter.
Giancana did his fellow don the respect of exchanging the swim trunks for a yellow Ban-Lon sport shirt and tan trousers. Rosselli also changed into a sport shirt and slacks, as had I, stopping at my room to do so. We sat at a round poker-style table in the living room area, with windows on the Atlantic.
Soon everybody but me was smoking, cigarettes not cigars. A shoulder-holster bodyguard was serving drinks and snacks. Right now we were all having soft drinks. Since Giancana had to be half in the bag already, I was fine with that.
I figured they already knew the basics, that Rosselli would have filled them in. They listened quietly, with an occasional nod, and no questions. Then I broached new territory.
“What the CIA wants,” I said, no euphemisms necessary among this crew and in a room that was certainly free of bugs, “is for a standard gangland hit. They want the bastard blown away. That simple.”
Giancana was shaking his head. “Too dangerous, Heller. How the hell do you recruit a shooter for a suicide mission like that?”
“It’s been done.”
“Yeah, well, even down here, Zangaras don’t grow on trees.”
Giancana was referring to the cancer-ridden Sicilian stooge who had taken out Chicago Mayor Cermak in nearby Miami, decades before, a mob hit written off as an attempt on president-elect FDR’s life.
Trafficante gestured with an open palm. “Something clean. Something neat.”
“Nothin’ wrong with poison,” Giancana offered.
Trafficante liked the sound of that. His smile made him look like a sinister Jack Benny. “Eliminates the need for an ambush.” He turned his bland gaze on me. “Don’t they have their own scientists, the CIA?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They got their Dr. Feelgoods. But they also got their Dr. Feelbads.”
“What we need,” Trafficante said, “is a pill. Some kind of capsule with a gel coating that dissolves. Something that can be slipped into…” He raised his glass of Coca-Cola. “… his drink. Or emptied into his food.”
I raised my hands, rose. “I’ll let you gentlemen discuss this. I frankly only need one thing from you-a decision on whether you’re game. I don’t need to be privy to any of the details.”
“Understood,” Trafficante said solemnly.
Giancana grinned. “Got it.”
“If it’s a go,” I said, “you’ll meet with a real CIA contact. In the meantime, I need to put something unrelated in motion for Sam.”
Giancana liked hearing that. “You go do that, Heller. We’ll have an answer for you by dark.”
And they did.
It was a go, all right. But that Vegas thing almost got me arrested. The Vegas op my LA partner, Fred Rubinski, lined up got busted for wiretapping Dan Rowan’s hotel-room phone.
The good news was Phyllis wasn’t playing “Sugartime” on Rowan’s skin flute. The bad news was I had to get Shep Shepherd to pull strings to keep the A-1 out of hot water.
There of course was no October surprise for Richard Nixon, just the November one of having the presidency snatched from him by JFK (with some help from Mayor Daley, Sam Giancana, and assorted other patriots).
And when the Kennedy brothers took over the Cuban mission, they only stepped things up-the ongoing attempts to kill Castro by way of poisoned drink, food, and cigars part of an overall scheme to (as Bobby put it) “stir things up on the island with espionage, sabotage, and general disorder.”
They dubbed the overall operation “Mongoose.”
The baby I’d been midwife to finally had a name.
CHAPTER 4
Saturday, October 26, 1963
A couple years back, when I was still living in my fifteenth-floor apartment at the St. Clair hotel, I got a lead from a well-heeled client that urban renewal would soon be leveling an area from Chicago Avenue to near North Avenue. A model high-rise for low-income housing called Cabrini Green was going in at the west end for the residents displaced when the slums got demolished. It was Negro poor now, but once upon a time it had been Sicilians, and Hell’s Corner, where violence and murder hung out.
With Old Town starting to clean up its act, I took advantage and picked up an old ripe-for-rehab brick three-story on Eugenie Street, one block north of North Avenue, with a stable-turned-garage in back for my Jaguar 3.8 town car. The main building, typical for this side street, was narrow but deep; there was not much of a backyard, with a garden I’d let go wild.
I lived on the upper two floors, with the ground level turned into a spartanly furnished apartment (with its own entrance) that the A-1 used for visiting clients and as a witness safe house. So when I say I picked up the place, I mean the A-1 did. Anything to keep the tax boys guessing.
Historic preservation defined the neighborhood as something special, and I lived in a kind of artist’s oasis surrounded by the high-income high-rises along Michigan Avenue and the cheap rooming houses (and the hookers and junkies) of Clark, LaSalle, and Wells (south of Division), with the Puerto Rican ghetto at the west end of Old Town as close by as the Playboy Mansion on State.
I liked Old Town with its newly put in old-fashioned lampposts and narrow, shade-tree-lined one-way side streets that would twist only to end unexpectedly, with their baroque renovated 1800s houses, some frame, others brick, with the occasional walled garden patio; and the wide boulevard of North Avenue, home to offbeat bars and restaurants, quirky boutiques and coffee houses, and even a Buddhist temple. Somebody had fired the starting gun on what they were calling the Sexual Revolution-probably Hefner, come to think of it-and I liked having the singles bars and nightclubs close at hand, where females gave away what used to be for sale in the same Rush and Division Street area.
As for work, if I didn’t feel like driving there, the El could drop me within a block of the Monadnock Building, and a bus or cab down LaSalle would do just as well.
Or maybe I was getting nostalgic in my middle age. I was just slightly north of what had been Tower Town, the Greenwich Village of Chicago in the twenties and thirties, where I’d once fallen in love with an actress. And not too far from me was the building where the guy they shot down outside the Biograph Theater had been hiding out. We’ll call him Dillinger, for simplicity’s sake.
I’m about to give a tour of an aging bachelor’s pad, and you are free to skip it. Just wait till some dialogue kicks in. On the other hand, as a trained investigator, I have found that the living quarters of a missing person or for that matter a suspected felon can tell you everything you need to know about the individual in question.
You entered from the cast-iron porch into the living room, with a jut of closet to the right and a big open room with off-white wall-to-wall carpet everywhere else. The plaster walls, painted a rust orange, had select framed artwork to break things up-black-and-blue-and-white spatter by Jackson Pollock (a Hef-suggested investment), a small melting clock by Dali, a Picasso lithograph called Still Life, a big Vegas-theme oil by LeRoy Neiman (a gift from the artist), and a little Shel Silverstein cartoon of a dancing nude girl (a gift from that artist).
The right wall was a white bookcase-my taste, I’m afraid, running to popular fiction like Harold Robbins and Ian Fleming, with a dab of Steinbeck and Hemingway, and some nonfiction: Ted White’s Making of the President, Sandburg’s Lincoln, Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The shelves were deep enough to address an LP collection that was further evidence of my middlebrow tastes-suspects included Henry Mancini (Peter Gunn), Julie London (Julie Is Her Name), Johnny Mathis (Greatest Hits), Dave Brubeck (Take Five), Bobby Darin (That’s All). No Sinatra (I knew him too well).
The furnishings ran
to overstuffed couches and chairs, some brown, some green, with throw pillows of those same colors. My brown-leather recliner, its back to the bookcase wall, faced the RCA color console TV, with its whopping twenty-one-inch screen, next to a walnut Grundig Majestic stereo console (compliments of the Wilcox-Gay Corp on LaSalle Street, a client). A little Danish modern teakwood bar tucked itself near the corner where what might have been an abstract sculpture was really the spiral staircase to the upstairs, where awaited a bedroom with the de rigueur round bed plus a home office and a shower.
Beyond the living room was a dining room that didn’t get used much, except when parties needed a long table where food could be laid out. A short hall with the other bathroom at left and more closet at right led into the kitchen, a white, fully modern affair vaguely reminiscent of an operating room. I’d been living alone long enough to get good in there. My specialty was breakfast for attractive young women before sending them home in a cab.
Right now I was sitting on a couch next to an attractive woman named Helen Beck, not young. You will be relieved to learn that I was not in a silk smoking jacket. Looked fairly dapper, though, in an olive Cricketeer blazer, light-green Van Heusen button-down with Webley shantung-silk dark-brown tie, and dark-brown Sansabelt slacks. Helen was in a tan jumper over a black turtleneck, a very young-looking outfit for a woman who was around my age, but she pulled it off.
Helen Beck’s stage name was Sally Rand, and I’d met her when I was in charge of pickpocket security at the Chicago World’s Fair. She had caused a sensation there with her nude fan dance in ’33, and a bubble dance encore in ’34. She had been a small, pretty, curvy blonde, and still was.
Her long blonde Lady Godiva tresses had always been a wig, the hair beneath a darker blonde now, shorter and worn up. She had lovely blue-green eyes, pretty features with a mouth that was probably too wide by most standards, but not mine.
The indirect lighting in my bachelor pad was subdued-Mancini jazz was playing (Mr. Lucky)-so neither one of us looked our age. But she was doing so well at staying youthful that boys were still paying good money to see a woman who was old enough to be their mother dance in the buff.
Helen and I were friends and occasional lovers, though I hadn’t seen her for a long time-at least ten years. I sometimes called her Sally, by the way, but usually Helen … always Helen in bed.
She’d phoned out of the blue, this morning, catching me at the office where I often put in a couple of hours on Saturday. She wondered what I was doing tonight.
“I hope I’m seeing you,” I told her.
“Giving you such short notice, Nate. I’m really sorry.”
“Are you between marriages?”
“As it happens, I am.”
“Then don’t be sorry. Where do I pick you up?”
“I’ll come to you,” she said. “What time? And where are you these days?”
I told her, then said, “Hey, I can probably get us tickets to Second City.”
“But that’s a popular show, isn’t it? Won’t they be sold out?”
“Yeah, but I have my ways.”
I’d done a job for the comedy coffee house’s founder Bernie Sahlins, getting one of his performers, Del Close, out of a jam.
“Make it here by six,” I suggested, “and we’ll have a chance to grab a bite first.”
That all sounded fine to her, and we’d had a fun evening starting with steakburgers at Chances R, where it was a little too loud for us to talk, really. This was followed by several hours of wild humor in the black-walled, table-crammed little venue on Wells that was the Second City.
Helen’s favorite sketch: bully kicks sand in weakling’s face, bully walks off with weakling’s girlfriend, weakling bodybuilds, returns to beach, slugs unfaithful girlfriend, and walks off arm in arm with … bully. My favorite part was a musical number, the Mayor Daley Twist: “Vote for Mayor Daley and we’ll throw in for free, A trip to Cal City on your Gaslight Key!”
Now we were back at my place. Helen was a nondrinker, part of her health regimen, but I’d put a few beers away. I made us coffee and we headed for the couch by the front windows, where we could finally get around to some real conversation.
“So what brings you to town, Helen? You’re usually working on a Saturday night.”
“I’m between bookings,” she said, too casually. She sipped at her coffee cup, then set it on the nearby coffee table. “Actually, I’m here to drum up some business.”
“So where are you staying?”
“The Lorraine.”
That spoke volumes. The Lorraine in the Loop was known as a stripper hotel. No fleabag, but at four bucks daily …
“Not exactly the Drake,” she sighed, then forced a little laugh. “Remember that all-white suite I sublet from that flamer? Right out of a Harlow movie, remember?”
“I recall the bedroom. The rest is a little blurry.”
She patted my arm. “Were we really that young?”
“You look young to me right now.”
“How much have you had to drink, Nate?”
“Not that much.”
I kissed her. It was lingering, trying to make up for lost time. We weren’t finished when she pulled away.
“I must taste like coffee,” she said.
“I like coffee. Who doesn’t like coffee?”
“But also cigarettes. I smoke too much.”
She smoked at Chances R and at Second City, too, pretty much nonstop. And right now she was lighting up a cigarette with a silver Zippo from her purse, from the coffee table.
“When I started,” she said, waving out the match, “the ads said it was good for you. Relaxing.”
“Helen, do you need my help?”
The blue-gray eyes flashed. “You mean financially? No. I’m okay. I’m not flush, but … the setback I had, it was more career than financial.”
“Career setbacks are financial.”
She let out smoke, then said, “Hasn’t caught up to me yet. But it did … I admit this particular setback hurt my confidence.”
“You’re still a very beautiful woman, Helen.”
She gave me a sly look. “I saw your picture in Playboy.”
“The one where I was covering myself with a towel?”
She slapped my shoulder playfully. “No. You weren’t identified. You’re not famous enough. But you were at some party, hobnobbing at the … what does he call it?”
She meant Hef, obviously.
“His mansion,” I said.
“You and all those young girls. Walking around half naked.”
“I swear I was fully clothed.”
“Do you date them, these overdeveloped children?”
“Sometimes,” I said.
Truth was, for the last several years, Bunnies from the Playboy Club downtown and Playmates in town for their photo shoots and young actresses who flowed through the mansion and the club had been just about the only women I’d dated. One of them, Krista, had been with me six months and would have broken my heart if it hadn’t been misplaced some time ago. She was out in Hollywood now, engaged to a producer of Saturday-morning kiddie shows.
“Do they have staples in their tummies, Nate?”
“Why, yes they do. And they’re airbrushed all over.”
That made her laugh. She drew in more smoke, let it out. “How much work do you do for that guy, anyway?”
Again, she meant Hef.
“The A-1 is on yearly retainer with his company. They get threatened by all kinds of suits and blackmail schemes. We handle it.”
“And you two are pals?”
“Nobody’s Hefner’s pal. He’s very self-contained. But we’re friendly. Like you saw in the magazine, I go to his parties now and then.”
She gestured vaguely around my little world. “And are you happy, Nate?”
“No, I’m miserable. Can’t you tell?”
“You might be at that. You’re like me-you’ve been on a hamster wheel of a career forever, and all w
e’ve got to show for it is busted marriages.”
“Only one busted marriage for me, Helen, and I have a son.”
“Yeah, so do I, and a mother to support, looking after him.” Her tone softened. “You get to see Sam often?”
“School breaks, including most of the summer. He’s coming in a few weeks for Thanksgiving vacation.”
“In high school, like my boy, right?”
I nodded.
“So, Nate … what is your life like, really?”
“It’s not bad. I work hard … not much investigating anymore, but I’m the face of the agency, and really am kind of famous, Helen. So the clients always want to meet with me first, before I delegate whatever it is they’ve brought me.”
“No more true detective stuff, huh?”
“Now and then. A couple of criminal lawyers locally like having me handle things personally. And they pay for the privilege. But mostly … I’m just another executive.”
“With a fuck-bunny pad.”
That made me laugh.
“Yeah,” I admitted. “With a fuck-bunny pad.”
I was used to hearing her talk that way-she could make a stevedore blush. But not me.
Her eyes were traveling. “They are some digs.”
“They are.”
“I bet you get more tail than Sinatra.”
“I bet I don’t.”
“Has there ever been a naked woman in this place over thirty?”
I thought about it. “Not over thirty-five.”
“Would you like to see one?”
I didn’t have to think about that. I stood and held my hand out to her.
I said, “I haven’t shown you my round bed, have I?”
The lighting upstairs was suitably dim for a pair of lovers in their fifties. Sally Rand had never been a stripper-she was a dancer, who with balletic grace gave glimpses of heaven from behind huge ostrich feathers or that diaphanous balloon she bounced around.
So there was no striptease to it, at all. She just pulled that too-young jumper over her head, then the turtleneck, kicked out of her half-heels, and stood there with sheer panties worn over nylons and garter belt, in good Girl Scout be-prepared readiness. A push-up bra emphasized breasts that had gained prominence with the passage of time.
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