“Why won’t you let us drive you?” he demanded. “We got paid to drive you!”
“Sam! I’m not getting in a car with you and Chuckie.”
“Why? Chuckie give you his word! I’ll give my word! You’re gonna make us look bad, Heller. I don’t like looking bad.”
“I don’t like looking dead. As for why I won’t get in a car with you? Because Chuckie here watched Spilotro crush a guy’s head in a vise till the bastard’s eyes popped out onto the floor, and didn’t miss a beat eating his pasta. And you, Sam? You hung Action Jackson on a meat hook and gave him the cattle-prod treatment until you decided to get really rough with him.”
Mad Sam was giggling again. “These stories you hear, Heller. They’re just so much exaggerated horseshit.”
“Well, I don’t wanna be a story, Sam. Chuckie, I’ll follow you in my Jag. You fellas go into the restaurant first, and I’ll trail in, and Johnny will never know I drove myself. No loss of face and no loss of income.”
Chuckie thought about that.
Finally he said, “All right, Heller. We’ll shake on it.”
He extended his hand.
I grinned at him. “Maybe later.”
I watched them go, Mad Sam shaking his head and chattering, Chuckie just plowing through the night like a ship’s prow, heading for the parked Lincoln.
When the car was gone, I went into the lower apartment.
Helen threw a barrage of questions at me, but all I said was, “If I’m not back in two hours, call Dick Cain. His home number’s in my book upstairs. Tell him I went to Agostino’s to see Rosselli. Got that? Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to piss like a racehorse.”
Agostino’s was on the corner where Rush and State Streets converged. The restaurant’s vertical neon-lettered sign and striped canopy were all that dressed up a drab old building. The Sciacqua brothers, Gus and Andy, ran the place, and I was a regular, so Johnny Rosselli had accidentally stumbled onto comfortable turf. Maybe somebody told him about the spaghetti with anchovy sauce.
I parked the Jag under a streetlamp on busy Rush, and walked about a block to the corner building that had been a drugstore with a blind pig over it, when I first started on the PD.
Chuckie and Mad Sam were pacing around to one side of the canopied entry, looking like the least-welcoming doormen in history, Sam in particular. Chuckie was smoking a cigarette, looking annoyed-probably as much with himself as me-and was probably about two minutes away from climbing back in that Lincoln and really coming after me when I strolled up.
Though it was fairly cool, I’d left the raincoat home, and my suit coat hung open for easy access to the Browning. I’d worn a feathered Dobbs hat and looked jaunty.
“Hi fellas,” I said. “May I make a suggestion?”
Mad Sam goggled at me, rocking forward on his feet. He was three feet from me but I could smell his rancid breath. “May I make a suggestion, Heller? That you should go fuck yourself?”
“You took your time,” Chuckie observed.
“I had to go in and pee,” I said, “before coming over here. What can I say? You guys are scary.”
Chuckie actually liked that remark. He had a decent sense of humor. Unlike Sam, whose idea of humor was to tie you naked to a hot radiator.
Chuckie said, “What’s your suggestion?”
“We go in together. You peel off into the bar, and I’ll head into the dining room. That’s where John is, right? That back corner booth?”
Chuckie nodded, approving the plan.
We went in, and the two killers joined the revelry in the jammed, lively bar, where the Venta brothers strolled with guitar and mandolin, as on every night. Gus was circulating, too, and waved to me from in there. I waved back.
Good, I thought. I’d been seen. Noticed.
The dining room, which wasn’t large, had maybe half of its twenty tables and booths filled. The decor was only lightly touched with Italian imagery, a wall mural here, some plastic vines there, a simple space with subdued lighting. I just nodded at the maitre d’ as I headed for the corner booth.
Johnny Rosselli was by himself in the burgundy button-tufted booth. As always, he looked movie-star handsome, or anyway Hollywood producer handsome, with his perfect silver-gray hair and that deep tan that made his blue-gray eyes stand out and the ivory grin so dazzling. His gray Ivy-League suit was perfectly matched to a shirt of lighter gray and a narrow tie as silver as his hair.
“Nate, I’m so glad you could make it,” he said, and gestured for me to join him in the booth.
We arranged ourselves so that we were sitting opposite. He had no food, just a glass of what I knew was Smirnoff on the rocks-he drank nothing else.
“Haven’t ordered yet,” he said genially. “Wanted to wait for you. You’ve been here before, right?”
“Many times. But I’m eating later with a lady friend. Don’t want to spoil that.”
“No, no, wouldn’t want to do that.”
“But you go ahead and order.”
With a diamond-bedecked hand, he waved over a red-jacketed waiter, politely let me make my drink request first-I got the rum cooler-and ordered one of the house specialties, chicken cacciatore.
“Thanks for seeing me at such short notice,” he said. “I hope I didn’t interfere with what you got planned tonight for you and your lady friend. Is it true you’ve got Sally Rand bunking in with you?”
I nodded.
“That impresses an old goombah like me. But don’t you usually go for the younger dolls?”
All the hoods talked Rat Pack these days.
“Sally and me are friends going way back,” I said. “World’s Fair days.”
“Thirty years ago! Would you believe it? Anyway, thanks for coming.”
“How could I resist when you send such charming emissaries?”
He smile was minuscule. “What do you mean, Nate?”
The waiter brought my rum cooler-ice, lime juice, rum, Coca-Cola in a highball glass. Agostino’s did not stint on the rum, and I would be sure to have only one. I needed my wits about me, if I didn’t want them in my lap.
Softly I said, “I mean Nicoletti and DeStefano.”
He shrugged. “So?”
“So I get the message.”
He sipped Smirnoff. “I just sent a couple of the fellas over to give you a lift, is all.”
“The two most ruthless killers in town, is all, the top whack guy and the biggest whack job. Both as well known for torturing people as for putting them out of their misery.”
He smiled, displaying no teeth, just puckish amusement. “All right. So it was a message of sorts.”
“A warning. That you could send those two animals again, and not just for chauffeur service. I almost shot the bastards, John. They won’t tell you, but I had the drop on them for five fucking minutes while Nicoletti played nice.”
Now the toothsome dazzler of a smile came out. “I’ll bet Sam didn’t.”
“No, he just giggled like a schoolgirl. A cop told me that’s what he did when they questioned him about murdering his brother. Nice crowd you run with, John.”
A tiny shrug of shoulders almost as broad as Nicoletti’s. “We swim in dangerous waters, Nate, you know that. Sometimes it pays to bring your own sharks along. Trained ones. You know, domesticated.”
“DeStefano is about as domesticated as a rabid mountain lion. So, you can probably have me killed if you feel like it. Okay. That’s the threat. What’s the point?”
He called the waiter over and ordered up another Smirnoff. I was still nursing the rum cooler.
“You ran into Jack Ruby the other night,” Rosselli said.
Did he mean at the 606 Club? Or the Silver Frolics? I couldn’t be sure.
So I said, “You mean, at that strip joint.”
“Yeah. Man, I hope that Wilson character don’t close it down. The Frolics is the only decent tits-and-ass palace in Chicago, should you want to take some business associate somewhere classy.”
Okay. So he was referring to my more recent conversation with Ruby.
His eyebrows raised and his voice took on an avuncular tone. “Nate, you got kind of rough with him, I hear.”
“I slapped him a couple times, but only after he threw a punch at me. Why, is he a friend of yours?”
That could have been taken two ways: a made Cosa Nostra guy; or … a friend.
“He’s one of our boys,” Rosselli said, with a flip of the other diamond-heavy hand. “Small fry, not even a soldier, just a … what do the spooks say? Asset.”
That CIA jargon, coming from Rosselli, was a little disconcerting. Not as disconcerting as having Chuckie and Mad Sam show up for you at your house; but disconcerting enough.
“So he threw a punch,” I said, shrugging, “and I slapped him. My read was, he’s a scrapper, and better to embarrass him than start a goddamn brouhaha.”
Rosselli was nodding. “That was probably wise. He’s an emotional little firecracker. He left this morning, by the way-back in Dallas by now. I mention him only because of this embarrassment with your client. The press agent from Milwaukee?”
The “embarrassment” was apparently Tom Ellison’s murder.
He spoke softly, his mellow voice soothing, friendly. “Listen, I’m aware he come to you for help, because of that money he had to pass along. You played bodyguard and that was that. Ruby being there, recognized by you, that maybe made somebody think a simple little handoff got turned into something … complicated.”
This was an admission that Tom indeed had become a loose end that got tied off.
“Nothing was complicated,” I said, “till somebody stabbed Tom Ellison in his hotel room.”
“I understand the Chicago PD says it was a hooker done it, or maybe some bar pickup. A bedroom boost that got out of hand.”
“Could be that.”
“But you don’t think so. Are you poking around because this Elliot was your friend?”
“Ellison, and no, John, I’m looking into it because the widow hired me to.”
The blue-gray eyes were narrow. “And just how are you poking around?”
His fresh Smirnoff on ice arrived.
“I’m not seeing how this is your business, John.”
“Humor me. I take an interest in my friends, Nate, particularly friends I’m involved with in, you know, various endeavors.”
I took that to mean Operation Mongoose.
“We’re looking into the victim’s private life,” I said, “and his business life, in Milwaukee mostly.”
“What have you turned up?”
I shook my head. “Too early. I may get a report tomorrow. We did some checking at the Pick, and some other hotels, to see if there’s a robbery ring using a female shill. Nothing on that yet, either.”
“Okay. Okay.” He sipped more Smirnoff. “I don’t see any problem with any of that.”
“You don’t?”
“No. Let it play out, and then tell the widow that you’ve done everything you could, send her a bill, and go find yourself other clients.”
“I would do that anyway, John. For a minute I thought you were saying I shouldn’t look into this killing.”
His gaze was thoughtful now. “No, I think you should. The police are as usual too hasty in their thinking, and you have a widow with her doubts … let’s assuage her.”
He did come up with the occasional five-buck word. Too much time in Hollywood.
“Then I don’t see what you’re asking,” I said, but really I did. “And I don’t know why you would send Dracula and Frankenstein over to see me, unless maybe you just dig Halloween.”
But really I did.
Rosselli said, “I don’t want you, and I don’t want any of your people, looking into anything having to do with Jimmy’s connection to him.”
He meant Hoffa’s connection to Ellison, of course.
“And,” the Silver Fox went on, “no digging whatsoever into anything related to the kind of business dealings that I am engaged in. And Mooney.”
The business dealings meant anything Outfit, and Mooney meant Giancana, the man he answered to.
“I wasn’t planning to,” I said.
“Good. Because the ramifications, they would stink on ice. And I don’t mean to threaten. To my knowledge, nobody thinks of you as a loose end, and won’t unless you start acting like one. And maybe I should apologize for insulting your intelligence by sending Chuckie and Sam around, to get your attention.”
“Well, they got it.”
“Just the same, I do apologize. The thing is, this could come back on us. And by us, I mean us … as in me and you and people we deal with. Jack Ruby, in particular. That envelope. You don’t want to know what that was about. Maybe I don’t even know what it was about. But that’s a door you cannot fucking open.”
“Okay,” I said.
I hadn’t asked “Why,” but he answered that question anyway: “It just might touch on a certain operation, Nate, a snake-killer-type operation? And we don’t want any of our connections to those kind of activities getting public scrutiny. Understood?”
“Sure.”
“Then we’re in agreement?”
“Yeah. I’ll let the Ellison investigation die a natural death.”
“You do that, and maybe you’ll be the one handed the next envelope of cash. How would you like that?”
What I would have liked was never sitting down again with the fucking likes of Johnny Rosselli. Years and years of having to deal with these Outfit psychopaths was wearing me the fuck down, and never seeing any of them again was my fondest desire.
“That would be nice,” I said.
His chicken cacciatore arrived. It smelled fantastic, but right now that marinara sauce reminded me a little too much of blood, draped as it was over dead chicken.
He asked, “I wish you would join me. Just have some minestrone soup. That won’t spoil your supper.”
“No thanks, John.”
He began to eat. His manners weren’t bad. No speaking with his mouth full, and frequent pauses to dab off red sauce with his white napkin.
“Nate, I can give you some nice reassurance, in the middle of this awkward unpleasantness tonight. I can tell you that there’s a change coming. Everything that you helped put in motion on our Miami trip, there at the Fontainebleau, it’s all coming to fruition. Great fucking things are coming, and you made it possible.”
I finished my rum cooler.
“That sounds swell,” I said. “But I do have to make one small point.”
“What’s that?”
“If Chuckie or Mad Sam show up on my doorstep again-alone or separate-I’ll just fucking shoot them. And whoever sent them. I may not be as cold-blooded as Nicoletti, or as screwy as Mad Sam, but people who cross me have been known to not be around anymore.”
That didn’t anger him. “You do have that reputation. But, Nate, remember … we are not adversaries. We are in this together. And if you don’t like this shit? May I remind you? You called me.”
Yes I had.
Goddamnit.
On my way out, I waved to Chuckie and Mad Sam, who were standing at the bar. Sam grinned and waved and Chuckie nodded. I lingered outside for a couple of minutes, waiting to see if the pair would come out to follow me. They didn’t.
Which was a relief, because had they done so, there might have been a gunfight, after all.
And as I drove back to Old Town, despite all the provocative and intimidating things Rosselli had said, all I could think of was a point I’d been careful never to raise with him.
That Mad Sam’s renowned weapon of choice was an ice pick, and that he would be plenty strong enough to pierce a guy’s sternum with one.
CHAPTER 16
Friday, November 1, 1963
Sitting surveillance on a street as busy as Division has its hazards, not the least of which is finding a decent goddamn parking place. Though it wasn’t ideal, each team watching that Victorian rooming house between t
he drugstore and the record shop was sharing the same spot, vacating it when each new team showed up. And feeding the same damn meter.
Eben Boldt and I, having taken the first shift yesterday afternoon, were taking this next afternoon shift as well. We were in a different Secret Service vehicle today, so as not to repeat ourselves-a navy-blue ’62 Chrysler-and had traded in suits for casual attire, zippered Windbreakers, sport shirts, chinos, sneakers. I’d skipped shaving today, in case we ever moved from vehicular surveillance to on foot. In the latter instance, looking somewhat scruffy could be useful.
We came on at two P.M., and the team we spelled said the two Cubans hadn’t come out yet today. The team before them saw the subjects enter the rooming house at one A.M., after a night of bar-hopping in the neighborhood, reported by the team before that. The night on the town did not involve the two white subjects, unseen as yet anywhere except on those Justice Department surveillance photos.
I was behind the wheel. Eben was watching the rooming house perhaps a little too intently.
“Hey,” I said. “You’re a chocolate guy in a vanilla part of town. Don’t advertise you’re casing that place. Somebody might call a cop.”
He frowned over at me in irritation, then thought it over. “Good point. Maybe I should check around back.”
I shook my head. “Their car’s in front. We checked that alley yesterday and there’s nowhere to park behind there, without blocking the way. Sit tight. Or, anyway … sit loose.”
“Okay, Nate.”
Here I was in my late fifties, successful, even relatively famous, pulling down high five figures (after expenses), owner of a detective agency with offices in three major cities, with money in the bank, a town house in Old Town, all my hair, all my teeth, and no medical problems except a few lingering scraps of shrapnel from bullets in various fleshy parts of my anatomy. What the hell was I doing at this late date sitting surveillance?
On the other hand, the President of these United States was due in town in twenty hours, and waiting for him was an unofficial reception committee of assorted malcontents with high-power rifles. So I would just have to put up with the indignity.
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