"Send him in," he said, and clicked off the intercom and put out his cigar. He smoothed his suit as best he could, and walked to the door to greet Ness as he came in. The slim man in the tan camel-hair topcoat, open to reveal a rather natty gray-striped double-breasted suit and maroon tie, slipped in, hat in hand, from among a horde of waiting politicos and job-seekers, the likes of which had thronged Burton's office doorstep for weeks.
Burton hoped his disappointment didn't show. From all he'd heard about Eliot Ness in the past two weeks, he had expected someone more physically impressive. In his mind's eye, he'd been picturing, foolishly, he knew, the movie actor Chester Morris. But this was no movie tough guy.
This was a man who looked even younger than his thirty-two years. This was a man who looked like he should be wearing a college graduation mortarboard, not a headful of pomaded, parted-in-the-middle hair, a dark disobedient comma of which made its way down his forehead.
"Your Honor," Ness said, his voice soft, husky, "allow me to be the last to congratulate you on your election." With a smile, he extended a hand.
Burton took the hand, shook it, relieved that the grip was as strong as it was.
He said, "I'm glad to finally get around to meeting you, Mr. Ness. I've heard so much about you, I feel I already know you."
Again Ness smiled, almost shyly Burton thought, and stood and waited until the Mayor rather awkwardly moved across the spacious office, gesturing toward a chair waiting opposite the desk in the corner.
"Sit, please, sit," Burton urged, taking his place behind the desk.
Ness sat, keeping his topcoat on, in apparent anticipation of a brief meeting. He crossed his legs, ankle on knee. Good, Burton thought: he wasn't nervous. He might look like a collegian, but he didn't intimidate easily.
"Smoke, if you like," Burton said, trying a smile out on the young Treasury agent.
"No, thanks. I don't smoke cigarettes."
Burton opened the cigar box on his desk. "Perhaps you'd like one of these Havanas?"
"No. Thanks. Go ahead, though."
Burton smiled tightly and shook his head no and shut the box. Then he said, "I do hope you have some vices. I don't trust a man who's too goddamn pure."
"I'm known to take a drink now and then."
"Ah. That's reassuring somehow. The most famous Prohibition agent of them all is a drinking man."
Ness lifted an eyebrow. "I've never had anything against drinking. The Prohibition law was a lousy piece of legislation."
Burton smiled again, not tightly this time. "That's interesting, coming from a man in your line."
Ness leaned forward a little, turning his hat in his hands restlessly. "The trouble with Prohibition was that so many people didn't believe in it. They were either against it or figured it was for the other guy. A law like that breeds contempt for the law in general. That helps make the underworld very strong, very wealthy. It gives them plenty of money to corrupt the law."
"So it's the… 'underworld' you've been after."
"I've never put John Q. Public in jail, Your Honor. I did put some gangsters out of business though."
"Al Capone, for instance."
Ness smiled, shrugged.
"And you're proud of that."
"It's going to be a hard one to top."
Ambitious. Burton liked that, too. That would help.
Feeling more at ease, Burton reached for the cigar box and withdrew and lit a Havana. He puffed it regally. "Do you know," he said, "that I've had you under investigation for two weeks, now?"
"No," Ness said, with mild surprise. "But where in hell did you find a Cleveland cop up to the job? No offense meant-to you."
Burton smiled and shook his head. "None taken. But truer words were never spoken. I had to rely on myself and some handpicked staff members. We've been checking around. Dwight Green speaks highly of you."
Dwight H. Green was Federal Prosecutor in Chicago.
"I'll speak highly of Dwight," Ness said, "if given half a chance."
"Frank Cullitan is another booster," Burton said.
Frank T. Cullitan was Cuyahoga County Prosecutor.
"Cullitan's a Democrat," Ness said.
"Does that matter?"
"Not to me."
Burton blew out a dark cloud of cigar smoke. "Every phone call I've made-Joe Keenan with the FBI, for instance-has resulted in high praise for Eliot Ness."
Ness smiled faintly, a hint of cockiness in his expression. Burton didn't mind that, either. That trait, too, would be necessary if this man were to take this job.
Actually, Burton would have been greatly surprised if Ness hadn't been at least a touch arrogant. The young man's record was impressive, to understate the case. Ness had been just twenty-six when he was recruited by the Justice Department to head up a special independent Prohibition Unit in Chicago that was designed as part of a two-pronged federal effort, born in the White House, to put public enemy/public embarrassment Al Capone away. While the other prong, a crack IRS team, worked to build a tax case, Ness and his raiders hit Capone's breweries, confiscated trucks and equipment, and made numerous arrests. This distracted Capone, dented his bank account, and disrupted his business practices by limiting the amount of payoff money available, without which countless crooked cops-both local and federal-had gone off the take.
The ten men in Ness' unit, handpicked by himself after poring over hundreds of government records, were widely respected as that rarity among big-city cops in this damn Depression: they couldn't be bribed. These "untouchables," as the Chicago papers had dubbed them in the aftermath of Capone's fall, routinely turned down bribes, at times being offered weekly payoffs damn near as large as their yearly salaries.
After Capone's conviction, Ness was appointed Chief Investigator of Prohibition Forces in Chicago, a post he held down till mid-1933, when he transferred from the Justice Department to the Treasury and became a "rev-enooer," closing down hundreds of hillbilly stills in the moonshine mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio. In August 1934 he became Chief Investigator of the Treasury Department's Alcohol Tax Unit in the northern district of Ohio, working out of Cleveland.
He'd attracted some publicity in Cleveland, though Burton had only been vaguely aware of Ness until two weeks before, when several newspaper reporters, including Sam Wild of the Plain Dealer and his city editor Phil Porter, began touting Ness. They knew Burton was shopping around for the right man to clean up the police department, and Ness-who was relatively new in Cleveland, and had no political ties or interests-seemed ideal for the job.
"The people will eat it up," Wild had said. A tall wiry guy right out of The Front Page, Wild had worked in Chicago and knew Ness from there. "He's the perfect P.R. move, and he can probably come as close to getting the job done as anybody."
Now Eliot Ness was sitting across from Burton's desk, and the question was whether or not Burton could convince the young G-man to take one hell of a gamble.
"Do you know why I've called you here?" Burton asked.
"Coordination between your people and mine?"
"No. I want to offer you a job."
Ness uncrossed his legs, then crossed them the other way.
"Go on," he said.
"My top priority right now," Burton said, "is law and order. Do you know what I mean by that?"
Ness lifted an eyebrow slightly, set it back down. "Frankly, it's usually just a political catch phrase."
"Granted. But what I mean is, I want this city to have a real police department again. Let me put it another way. I figure I can't clean up Cleveland until the police department itself is clean."
Ness sat forward. "That makes sense to me."
"I need a strong man to reorganize-to transform-that pitiful excuse for a police department into a modern, honest law enforcement agency. You've shown yourself to be a tough cop who doesn't flinch in a dangerous situation. And wading into our corrupt force will be dangerous as hell. The corruption is firmly entrenched. You won't just b
e stepping on toes, you'll be stepping on livelihoods."
"And lively hoods," Ness said, wryly.
Burton smiled momentarily, then soberly said, "It isn't just the Eliot Ness who drives trucks through locked doors that I'm interested in. It's the Eliot Ness who is a scientifically trained criminologist. The Ness who was an honor student at the University of Chicago, the site of some of the most advanced thinking in America, as regards social concerns. Your major fields of study, my investigation has revealed, were commerce, law, and political science."
"What job are we talking about, Mayor? Chief of Police?"
Burton shook his head no. "We have an honest chief. He happens to be rather ineffectual, but never mind. He is well-liked, and I would have some difficulty pulling him out without stirring up a political fuss that would just get in our way. No, I'm talking about the Director of Public Safety. The top slot."
Ness smiled, just barely. "That's a job I'd be interested in."
Burton pressed on. It was too early for such an acceptance. Ness didn't know the facts yet. "You'd be the youngest Director of Public Safety in the city's history. I consider you the ideal candidate to direct the investigation into, and purging of, our corrupt police department… but your role would be much more wide-ranging than that. You'd be in charge of twenty-four hundred men in the city's police and fire departments. It's a big job for a young man. Are you up to it?"
"Yes," Ness said.
"I think you are, too. I don't think there's a better man for this job."
"Do I sense a 'but' in all this?"
Burton sighed, nodding gravely. "You do. In all honesty, this job is not a plum. In effect, I'll be tossing you a hand grenade and you'll be smothering it with your body."
"Frankly, Your Honor, I'm not exactly following you."
Burton stood. Almost absently, he said, "You realize, I'm sure, that I may well owe my election to the previous Director of Public Safety…"
Safety Director Martin J. Lavelle, a former police captain who had driven a Rolls Royce, had been present last summer at a wild, drunken party on a boat on Lake Erie, where a young woman had fallen overboard and drowned. The safety director had failed to report the death, and when the papers got hold of it, several days later, there was hell to pay for the Davis administration.
"I think," Ness said, smiling with wry self-confidence, "I can get you just as much publicity, but with a slightly different slant."
"That's what I'd be counting on. Frankly, your publicity value is as important to me as your credentials, impressive as they are. I'm not unlike a theatrical producer in this, Mr. Ness. That is, I'm looking for a star. And you're it."
Ness shrugged. "The headlines'll happen. I'm not worried."
"But you should be. You'll be under the gun. The clock will be ticking'."
Ness frowned, in confusion, not displeasure. "What clock will be ticking?"
Burton went to the window. He brushed back a beige curtain and looked out at his dark city. "You'll be up against possibly the most corrupt police force in the nation. And they're a well-established part of the city's landscape. The Detective Bureau and the precinct commanders in particular have strong political ties."
"Excuse me, but what do you care? This is your administration now."
Burton looked at the young G-man and smiled. "You really aren't political, are you, Mr. Ness? The city council is going to be up for grabs. The reform Republicans, with whom I'm shakily aligned, will go toe-to-toe with the old-line Republicans, while a couple varieties of Democrats sow dissent and pursue their own vested interests. All the while former mayor Davis will be working behind the scenes to make me as unsuccessful as possible, largely but not exclusively through his friend Councilman Fink."
"Could make for merry hell."
"Could make for merry hell indeed. For me to accomplish anything as mayor, I'm going to have to hold onto this office for several terms. And to survive this term, I have campaign promises to keep."
Ness nodded. "Chief among them, cleaning up the cops."
"Exactly. But corruption isn't our only police problem. We've got a badly out-of-date, poorly equipped police force whose very squad cars are falling apart. The fire department's in similarly sad shape."
"So it comes down to money."
"Money. Budget. Take the job, and you'll have to submit budgets on both the police and fire departments within two weeks." Burton sat back down. "Budget hearings will begin shortly after the first of the year. By early March, the council will vote. And if we don't get our budget you'll be hamstrung from the outset. You won't be able to get a damn thing done. You'll be an automatic lame duck."
Ness breathed out slowly. "By that you mean you'd have to let me go at the end of your term, and try again with a new safety director."
"I'd most likely let you go before that. And I think you know what it would do for your career in law enforcement. Having come in with great fanfare in the press and then accomplishing nothing, you'd look a fool. I won't pretend otherwise. I won't sugarcoat it. Meanwhile, I'd most likely bring in a new safety director about this time next year and, I would hope, find someone else with impressive credentials who might help me land the budget I need next time around."
"I see what you meant about that hand grenade."
"I'm not sure you do. What this comes down to is that you would have to get results in the police corruption investigation-spectacular results-before March. That's your ticking clock. You'd have barely more than two months to produce. You'd have to fill the headlines with such derring-do and miraculous modern police work that even a politically divided and quite possibly corrupt city council cannot ignore your budget demands."
Ness shifted in the chair. "Specifically, what sort of results would you expect?"
"There are, obviously, some high-ranking police officers in this city who are up to their brass buttons in graft. Rumor has it that a sort of 'department within the department' exists, ruled over by men such as these. You'll have to identify, and suspend, and then arrest, at least one of them."
"Before March."
"Before March," the mayor said.
"That won't be easy. There's a code of silence among cops. Even the honest ones tend not to 'rat' on the bent ones."
"That would be your problem."
"Yes, it would."
"And you'd have to make some inroads on other fronts… lead some raids on these wide-open gambling joints around town and these so-called 'policy' banks…"
Ness was nodding. "Those day-to-day illegal lotteries are what get cops on the 'pad' in the first place. There's a direct relationship between gambling and police corruption."
Burton narrowed his eyes. "Do you have any objection to leading raids yourself? We need your publicity value. We can't get that if you stay behind a desk."
Ness stood. He walked to the window, tan topcoat flapping, and looked out, smiling to himself.
"Before you leveled with me about the career risk entailed in this thing," Ness said, glancing back at him, "I was about to tell you my conditions for taking this job."
"Which are?"
Ness walked around to the front of the desk and leaned one hand on its top, the other clutching his fedora, as he looked Burton square in the eyes. "I was ready to say I would take the position on two conditions: one, that I not be deskbound, that I can be as active in investigative work as I choose, turning over the administrative duties to an assistant; and two, that I be given a free hand, without political interference. No whitewash jobs. Chips fall where they may."
"I see no problem with that."
"We talked about stepping on toes before. What if I have to step on the toes of some city council members? Councilman Fink, for example? Won't that defeat your purpose?"
Burton laughed. "If you pull this thing off, the city council will have to vote us our money, sore toes or not."
Ness smiled on one side of his face.
"What do you say, Mr. Ness? Do you still want the job, after wha
t you've just heard?"
Still smiling, Ness again shrugged. "How's the pay?"
"Not great, but it's a few thousand more a year than you're currently getting. There are some fringe benefits. We'll provide you with a city car. What are you driving now?"
"A black Ford coupe that belongs to the federal government."
"Well, in the future you'll be driving a black Ford sedan that belongs to the city. How's that for a step up?"
"My predecessor got a Rolls Royce, but what the hell. I live in Bay Village. Is that a problem?"
"You'll need a residence within the Cleveland city limits. I believe that can be provided for you. We could work out all these details-if you're interested in the job."
"Your Honor," Ness said, grinning like a kid, "I wouldn't miss this party for the world."
"Then let's get you sworn in," the mayor said, reaching for his phone. "The party starts tomorrow morning."
CHAPTER 3
It was almost nine that night when Eliot Ness, behind the wheel of the government Ford he would be turning in tomorrow morning, pulled into the drive of his Bay Village home. Several lights were on in the downstairs of the gray stucco, blue-shuttered two-story house. He hoped Eva hadn't waited dinner for him. He'd called to tell her not to, but she did have a considerable streak of martyr in her, God love her.
He left the Ford in the garage, a separate building with a rentable loft-they just hadn't gotten around to renting it yet-between the main house and the lakefront. A friend in Chicago, with the old Retail Credit Company he'd worked for in his early private detective days, had put him in touch with a friend who'd helped him land this nice house for a song. A very nice investment it was, even if such Bay Village homes as this were bungalows compared to the near-mansions of Lakewood and Rocky River. On his long drive home well over an hour from downtown, he drove by those lavish homes each night and smiled and shook his head and promised himself, one day…
Tonight it occurred to him that his evening daydreams might soon come true, if he could pull off this new job. Of course if he failed, he might never achieve his career goals and the material comforts his success would bring. But, what the hell-not trying was in itself failure.
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