The Million-Dollar Wound

by Collins, Max Allan

  Pegler made a disgusted face, pulled a chair up and sat down. “Very amusing, I’m sure. What have you got to tell me?” He wore another expensive, beautifully tailored suit with lapels wide as wings, light brown this time, with monogrammed pocket kerchief and a dark brown tie touched with white.

  “Nothing, really,” I said. “I’m making a confidential report to Robert Montgomery. If he wants to share any of it with you, that’s up to him. But nothing I discovered is anything you’ll be able to easily prove. Nobody who talked to me is going to talk to you, or anybody, not openly.”

  “You could be quoted,” he said, with a shrewd little devilish smile. “My column is not a court of law; I’ll admit hearsay evidence, gladly.”

  “No. It wouldn’t be healthy to.”

  “I see. I didn’t take you for a coward, Heller.”

  “I didn’t take you for a jackass. I’ve been risking my life, poking into this. This is Frank Nitti’s business you’re nosing in, and if you really did play cards with Jake Lingle, once upon a time, you’ll know that the Capone mob has been known to kill reporters—so you’re not immune, either.”

  He took his cigarette case out of his coat pocket and selected a cigarette and lit it up. “Is it a matter of money?”

  “No, it’s a matter of life and death. I don’t want you for a client, Mr. Pegler. I have enough clients already.”

  He shrugged elaborately, blew out smoke. “Do what you please. I don’t need your paltry gossip, anyway. You’ve already helped me, Heller, whether you know it or not, whether you want to or not.”

  “Really?”

  His smile, the tilt of his head, turned coy. “I’ve just spent the last several days looking through old police records. With the help of a local officer, a Lieutenant Bill Drury, and several others, I’ve made some interesting discoveries.”

  Bill Drury and I had started out on the pickpocket detail together; he was an honest, ambitious cop who hated the Outfit almost irrationally. He’d rousted every major mob figure in the city, numerous times, just for fun—Nitti, Guzik, Ricca, all of them. Why he was still alive was a mystery it would take a better detective than yours truly to ever solve.

  But I meant it when I said, “Bill is as good as they come.”

  “He spoke highly of you,” Pegler conceded. “If I hadn’t dropped your name, in fact, I don’t know that he would have devoted the time to this he did. He helped me locate a number of brief jail terms Bioff served, dating back as early as 1922. But more importantly we tracked down the record of your arrest of Bioff. There it was—a lonely faded index card—with your name and Shoemaker’s, as arresting officers.”

  “Old Shoes”—another honest cop, a legendary police detective, dead now.

  “So what?” I said. “I already told you Bioff got a conviction off that bust.”

  Smugness was in every line of his face, every pore. “We needed verification. But we found much more; we hit the proverbial jackpot. You see, Willie Bioff’s never served his six-month sentence for pandering.”

  I shrugged. “I could’ve told you that. He clouted his way out of it.”

  “Perhaps. But I don’t think you understand—it’s on the records as an ‘open’ conviction—Willie Bioff still owes the state of Illinois six months.”

  I sat forward. “Maybe you really do have hold of something. You’re sure about this? My understanding was he appealed it and bought his way out.”

  “Money no doubt exchanged hands,” Pegler said, blowing out smoke but not hot air, “and William Morris Bioff did appeal the sentence, and was released pending the decision of the higher court. But when I placed a simple phone call to the clerk of the Supreme Court in Springfield, Illinois, I learned that the appeal had never reached there. The case had been purposely sidetracked in Cook County, somewhere, and conveniently forgotten.”

  Jesus. In 1930 I’d been part of a raid on a sleazy South Halsted Street brothel and we’d caught the stocky little pimp slipping out the back with the brothel’s tally sheet in hand; later he’d slapped one of the whores who said the wrong incriminating thing about him, and I’d sworn to myself the little bastard would serve time in the Bridewell for it, Chicago or no Chicago. Now, almost ten years later, it looked like maybe he would.

  “I’ve laid the information before State’s Attorney Thomas E. Courtney,” Pegler said grandiosely, “who informs me he’ll request Bioff’s extradition to Illinois.”

  “By God, I think you’ve got the little bastard.”

  “I’ve got the little kike, all right.”

  Silence.

  “Watch that, okay, Mr. Pegler?”

  Amused little smile. “You’re offended?”

  “Nothing much offends me. But sometimes I get pissed off awful fierce. You remember me—the guy with the gun?”

  Pegler smirked at that and said, “At any rate, your friend Lieutenant Drury has come up with the goods on George Browne, as well. In 1925 Browne was involved in a gangland shooting, in a restaurant; he was shot in the seat of the pants, and his companion was killed. Browne was quoted as telling the police at the scene, ‘I’ll take care of it, boys.’ Four weeks after he got out of the hospital, the man who fired the shots was himself shot to death, his assailant never found.”

  “That’s not as good as an unserved jail sentence,” I said, “but it’ll play in your column. It’ll paint Browne as a union man with a gangster past.”

  “They’re both finished,” he said, with quiet glee. “And so is the Stagehands Union.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that. Maybe they’ll clean house. Maybe if Bioff and Browne and the Outfit are tossed out, it’ll be a real union again.”

  He looked like he had a bad taste in his mouth, as he said, “A real union, what is that? An inert rank and file who go to meetings only when something’s in it for them. And a union boss who’s part ham actor and part Tammany chief, who knows enough not to show too much respect for their intelligence.”

  “I don’t want to talk unions with you, Pegler. I’m for exposing Bioff and Browne and Dean and the rest, because they’re perverting something that should work. But your anti-unionism offends me, it’s bullshit. My father—”

  “Your father. He was of that particular tribe, I take it?”

  “What?”

  Pegler rose. Stabbed his cigarette out in the glass tray on my desk. “Nothing. It’s too bad you’re unwilling to put your convictions on the line and tell me what else you’ve discovered, in your own investigation. You’ll be a hero in my column, nonetheless, as the surviving arresting officer, as the man whose hard work ten years ago made possible bringing Willie Bioff to justice today.”

  “Spell my name right and mention the agency and I won’t sue you.”

  “How generous of you. Are you certain you wouldn’t care to share any further information with me? There’s money in it. A man of your persuasion can appreciate that, I’m sure.”

  “My persuasion?”

  His lip curled in a patrician sneer. “You’re a Jew, aren’t you? Mr. Heller? You don’t look it, but you are.”

  “So fucking what?”

  He didn’t like being cursed at; his face reddened and his satanic eyebrows twitched and he said, “Listen to me, you foulmouthed little hebe—if I didn’t need you to make this story float, I’d paint you for the kike coward you are…”

  I was out from behind the desk before he could finish and grabbed him by the wings of his suitcoat and dragged him out of my inner office and dragged him through my outer office and hurled him out into the hall, where he bounced up against and off the abortionist’s office, almost shattering that glass.

  “I could break you,” Pegler said, sitting in a pile, breathing through his nose like a bull.

  “I could kill you,” I said.

  He thought that over. I was, after all, a guy who’d pointed a gun at him more than once. And I was breathing hard, too, and looked like I meant it. I did.

  He pushed up and straightened himsel
f and walked off without another word.

  That evening, in Barney’s Cocktail Lounge, I sat in a rear booth with my ex-boxer pal and said, “I never felt this Jewish before. I never felt particularly Jewish at all. Anyway, not since I was a kid.”

  Barney hadn’t been surprised by my Pegler story.

  “There’s a lot of it goin’ around,” he said, shrugging.

  I knew what he meant.

  “Don’t start with me, Barney. Please don’t start.”

  He didn’t. But for the first time I think I understood him, and his concerns. I knew that something was loose in the world that was worse than the Chicago Outfit.

  For the moment, however, the Outfit was bad enough.

  Because suddenly there was Little New York Campagna standing by the booth with his cold dark eyes and impassive putty face trained on me.

  And without saying a word, he clearly conveyed to me that somebody in a suite at the Bismarck Hotel was waiting to see me.

  Nitti didn’t have an office in the Loop. He did his business out of several restaurants and various hotels—most frequently the Bismarck, on the corner of LaSalle and Randolph, just across from City Hall. I’d met Nitti here before, in this very suite—the Presidential Suite, the little gold plate on the door said. The room was at the dead end of the seventh-floor hall, down at the left after you stepped off the elevator, and I was presently standing in a vestibule facing Louis Campagna.

  We’d walked here from Barney’s cocktail lounge; a gentle snow falling. Sunday night in the Loop, and the concrete canyons were strangely peaceful. Like church. My heart was a trip-hammer.

  And it hadn’t slowed yet; which was fine with me, since having a heart that was still beating was something I valued. Campagna hadn’t said two words to me on the way here—he hadn’t said one word, either—but he was keeping two eyes on me, rarely blinking, perfecting a cold dark stare that made me wonder just how much trouble I was in.

  If I was in serious trouble, wouldn’t I be dead in an alley by now? Or did Nitti merely want to talk to me, first? He’d sent Campagna after me, tonight, just as earlier in the week he’d sent him to deliver a message; and Campagna was beyond that sort of thing—he was in the inner circle, now, not just a bodyguard or an enforcer. Yet Frank had sent him, not some flunkie. What did that mean?

  The door opened and Johnny Patton, in a dapper gray topcoat with a dark fur collar, exited, looking back, smiling, saying, “A pleasure as always, Frank,” a black homburg in one gloved hand.

  What was Patton—the “boy mayor of Burnham,” Eddie O’Hare’s business partner at Sportsman’s Park—doing here? And why had Nitti let me see him?

  Patton put his hat on and walked by without a word, not recognizing me, or not choosing to.

  Campagna jerked a thumb toward the door, which Patton had left ajar.

  That meant I was to go in.

  There were no bodyguards in the suite, at least in the living room that I entered into, the same white-appointed, gold-trimmed room I remembered. A bedroom off the entryway, to my right, had its door cracked open and a light was on; someone was rustling around in there. Whether a bodyguard or a woman or what, I couldn’t say. And I sure as hell didn’t ask.

  As for Nitti, he was seated on a white couch, feet on a glass coffee table on which were several stacks of ledger books; he was thumbing through one, reading one of the large, awkward-to-hold books like the latest popular novel. He was wearing a brown silk dressing gown, black dress pants and brown slippers. There was no monogram on the robe. A glass of milk, about a third drunk, was making a ring on the coffee table, next to some ledgers.

  NITTI

  He looked heavier than the last time I’d seen him, and older, but good. The mustache he’d had when I first met him was long gone; he was a smooth executive now, despite his rough features, a strong, almost handsome face with flecks of scar tissue here and there, most noticeably on his lower lip. His hair was longer, brushed back with less of that slick look I remembered, a little gray in it, and the part in his hair had wandered from left to right. Maybe he was cutting his own hair, now—I’d known him to be dissatisfied with other barbers. I say “other” barbers, because he’d begun as a barber himself (his first such job in Chicago had been in the same shop as Jake “The Barber” Factor, who later helped Nitti frame Roger Touhy, but that’s another, if typical, Nitti tale) and even before he began to effect the look and style of a business executive, he’d been immaculately groomed.

  “Forgive me if I don’t rise,” he said.

  I tried to find sarcasm in the words, but couldn’t quite do it. Couldn’t quite rule it out, either.

  “Sure, Frank.” Was it still okay to call him that? “Mind if I sit down?”

  Still reading the ledger, his eyes having not yet landed on me, Nitti waved one hand with mild impatience, saying, “Sit, sit.”

  I sat in a high-backed, gold-upholstered chair near Nitti. I was up higher than him, in this thronelike chair; and he was a relatively small man, perhaps four inches shorter than me. None of which kept me from feeling intimidated, and very small indeed.

  After what seemed forever, and was probably a minute, Nitti put the ledger on top of some other ledgers and pointed to his glass of milk. “Care for something? Just ’cause I gotta drink this goddamn stuff doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy yourself.”

  “No thanks, Frank.”

  “Not a drinking man?”

  “Sometimes. Not during business. I assume this isn’t a social call.”

  He shrugged, ignored the question, saying, “I’m not a drinking man myself. Some occasional vino, that’s about it. My apologies for bothering you on a Sunday, a Sunday night at that.”

  “No, that’s fine,” I said, “it’s good to see you,” trying not to let it sound like a lie.

  He gestured with both hands, a very Italian gesture, or in his case Sicilian. “I usually don’t work on Sundays,’’ he said. “I like to spend Sunday with the family. Go to Mass. Play with my boy. Hey, you want to see something?”

  I swallowed. “Sure, Frank.”

  He dug under the robe. I remembered the story about the night Capone threw a testimonial banquet for Scalise and Anselmi and was toasting them when he reached behind him for a baseball bat and splattered their brains.

  But Nitti was only getting his wallet. He opened it, grinning, pushed it in front of me.

  It was a picture, in a plastic compartment in the wallet, of Nitti, smiling, his arm around a little boy. Hugging the child; the child was smiling, too, obviously loving his father. As that’s what this obviously was: a snapshot portrait of father and son.

  “He’s big for six,” Nitti said, beaming; he withdrew the wallet and looked at the picture himself. “You know, I’m a little guy.”

  Right.

  “My son’s gonna be a bigger man than me. The men in his mama’s family are six foot, some of ’em. He’ll stand taller than his old man.”

  There seemed to be no irony in his words.

  “Handsome lad,” I said.

  Nitti nodded in agreement, smiled at the picture, and put the wallet back in his pocket.

  “Now,” he said, “what’s this about you nosing around in the Outfit’s business?”

  I hadn’t seen any baseball bats when I came in; maybe one was behind Nitti’s couch…

  “What do you mean, Frank?”

  “Don’t shit me, kid.”

  I wasn’t a kid anymore, but I didn’t point that out to him; I’d been young enough for him to call me that when we first met, and it was clear I’d be a kid to him till the day he died. Maybe that was a saving grace; maybe his looking on me that way was keeping me alive.

  “I did a job for Willie Bioff,” I said. Hoping that was what he wanted to hear. Hoping to Christ he didn’t somehow know about Montgomery. That was the job that would get me the testimonial banquet.

  “I know,” Nitti said. He reached for the glass of milk, sipped it; brushed away a small milk mustache with
a hand that then extended to point a blunt finger at me. “You shouldn’t try keeping things from me.”

  I gestured with two open hands. “Bioff didn’t ask me to keep anything from you, exactly. He just didn’t want this situation advertised. He seemed to think he was in the doghouse enough with you fellas, over the income-tax trouble he was in.”

  Nitti’s eyes weren’t narrowed; they seemed as casual as two eyes could be. But I knew they were studying me; watching my every movement. Looking for me to betray myself.

  “I sometimes think it was a mistake,” Nitti said, reflective all of a sudden, “letting that pimp represent us. But he was in on the ground floor, on the IA deal, so it only seemed fair.”

  “He seems to have done a good job for you.”

  “He’s got himself rich, is what he’s done, and I don’t begrudge him. That’s what we’re in it for, all of us, our own financial well-being. How the hell else are a bunch of immigrants like us gonna make it in this world, if we don’t look after ourselves?”

  “Right,” I said. He seemed to be including me in that, so I didn’t remind him I was born here.

  “Tell me what you did for Bioff, exactly.”

  I did. From Barger through the phone calls to the movie circuit bigwigs to Estelle. No details about my method of dealing with the latter party, but Nitti smiled at the mention of her name, anyway.

  “Nice work if you can get it,” he said.

  “She’s who told you, isn’t she? I mean, Sonny Goldstone obviously reported seeing me at the Colony Club, but then you talked to Estelle, and she spilled about me and Bioff, right?”

  “Never trust a whore, kid. Haven’t you learned that yet?”

  “I guess not. But, then, I’m tempted to say the same thing to you about pimps.”

  “Point well taken,” he said, nodding.

  “I, uh, didn’t feel I was working behind your back, Frank. Bioff’s one of yours, after all.”

  For the first time this evening, his expression seemed thoughtful, not offhand. “I asked around a little. I hear you hate Bioff. Why would you take work from somebody whose fuckin’ guts you hate?”