True Crime

by Collins, Max Allan

  Nitti patted his mouth with a napkin.

  “So it’s not enough for Dillinger to be captured,” I said. “He’s got to buy it. He’s got to die.”

  Nitti cleared his throat. “Let me tell you something, kid. For a long time these fuckin’ outlaws could get away with what they’re doing. They were like stagecoach and train robbers in the Old West; fact is, most of ’em are dumb Okies who think they’re Jesse James. And they got away with it, for a while. ’Cause all they needed was fast flivvers and lots of back roads and plenty of hideouts. And they weaved all across the country, and the law couldn’t even cross state lines to chase ’em. They had a sweet little thing going. Long-term, however, it stunk. Which is why only suckers—farmers, dumb Okies like that—got in that business. But they had their time, I’ll give ’em that. Only their time is over.”

  He sipped some milk. He seemed to be through with his speech, but I nudged him on. Carefully.

  “You mean their time’s over, because of the feds,” I said. “Because now the feds can chase ’em across state lines.”

  Nitti nodded, shrugged. “That’s it, that’s a big part of it. The rewards on their heads’ll smoke ’em all out eventually, too. But times are changing. You can only get away with that shoot-’em-up bullshit for so long.”

  “You mean you can’t get away with too many Saint Valentine’s Day Massacres.”

  “No. And you can’t shoot too many Jake Lingles. The public likes to make a hero out of somebody like Al or Dillinger, for a while. But when things get too bloody, when the headlines get too nasty, the public turns on you.”

  “Frank, these outlaws—your Outfit’s had dealings with ’em over the years….”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I hear things. I’m awake.”

  “That’s a nice way to be, awake. You ought to hold onto that thought.”

  I said nothing.

  Then for some reason he continued. “Yeah, Al had a soft spot for that kind, particularly the bank robbers. Don’t ask me why. The suburbs, Cicero, Maywood, Melrose Park, they were always welcome there, where Al was concerned. There were always thieves hiding out there.”

  “For a fee?”

  “Nothin’s free, kid.”

  “I’d guess a certain amount of fencing of goods and hot money by such thieves might also be handled through the Outfit.”

  “Easy, kid.”

  “And the guns those guys use, machine guns particularly, and explosives, they got to come from somewhere. And sometimes, like any small business, they’d need seed money, short-term loans. And Outfit sources are the natural place for both….”

  Nitti was shaking his head, but not by way of denial. He said, “You better button it right there, kid.” Not mad; just fatherly advice.

  I buttoned up.

  Then Nitti couldn’t keep from saying: “It’s just better for some people to be dead, kid.”

  He’d opened the door, so I took a breath and went on through.

  “Well, uh, if somebody wanted Dillinger dead, why wouldn’t somebody just kill him? Why go to such elaborate lengths to have the feds do the job?”

  Nitti’s mouth etched itself into an enigmatic little smile.

  Then he said, “You’re operating here out of curiosity, Heller. Nothing else. No client. Just curiosity. And you know what happened to the goddamn cat.”

  I knew.

  “You played a part in this thing,” Nitti said. “Like I said, if I’d known they was planning to suck you in, I’d have stopped it. Only they did suck you in. Well, you played your role, now get offstage, go home. Stay out of it, and stay the hell out of the way.”

  “What if Cowley or Stege or Purvis come around?”

  “Why don’t you just report what you know to be true, and leave it go at that, in such event.”

  “You mean, tell them about tailing Polly Hamilton and Jimmy Lawrence, and that Anna Sage says Lawrence is Dillinger.”

  “Yeah. It starts and ends with that.”

  “And I just stand by and let the poor shmuck get killed.”

  He raised a finger in a cautionary fashion. “I’m not saying anybody’s going to get killed. But what skin off your ass is it if some fuckin’ Hoosier outlaw gets what he’s gonna get someday anyway?”

  “Frank,” I said, “when I bitched about Cermak’s boys hitting you, the same argument was advanced. That Nitti was a guy who was going to meet a bullet one of these days anyway, so what the hell.”

  He gestured with two open hands. “I’m a restaurant owner. Restaurant owners don’t get shot, not unless maybe some goddamn outlaw comes in and robs the till.”

  “I don’t like being a part of this.”

  “Good,” Nitti said. “Don’t be.” He reached in his right pants pocket and took out a money clip. The thickness of bills included a fifty on top, which he peeled off, then he peeled off another fifty. He smoothed them on the tablecloth before me; the two bills were spread out in front of me like supper. Like a six-course meal.

  “I want to be your client,” Nitti said.

  “You do?”

  “Yeah, kid. That’s a hundred-dollar retainer. I want your services between now and Monday. I got something I want you to do for me till then.”

  “What’s that, Frank?”

  “Sleep,” he said. “Go home and sleep. Till Monday.”

  I swallowed.

  Then I took the money, because I didn’t dare not take it. Added it to the five and five ones on my own clip.

  “This meeting between us, it never happened. Capeesh?”

  “Capeesh,” I said.

  “This is hard for you, ain’t it, kid?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I like you. I really do.”

  And he did. He cared about me. The way you like and care about a character in a radio serial you follow. But if a streetcar ran me over in tomorrow’s episode, he wouldn’t lose any sleep that night.

  “Is it okay if I go now, Frank?”

  “Sure, kid. You don’t have to ask my permission to do things. You’re your own man. That’s what I like about you. Now, go.”

  I went.

  R

  ANDOLPH AND

  S

  TATE,

  D

  EARBORN, A BLOCK DOWN

  14

  At my office that afternoon I couldn’t resist checking one last thing out. Frank Nitti or no, there was something I had to follow through on. In the bottom of my pine four-drawer file I had several out-of-town phone books, as well as two Chicago cross-directories (numbers first; addresses first). I took out the Gary, Indiana, book and looked in the Yellow Pages. There were six grain companies. I called the personnel departments of each; it took all the rest of the afternoon, and talking to two or three people each place, which ran my phone bill up, but I did it. And John Howard didn’t work for any of them.

  Not that I’d expected him to. It was obvious, now, that my traveling-salesman client was a con artist hired to rope me into the play Zarkovich and Nitti were putting on. I felt like a chump. And with good reason: I was a chump.

  I took the money clip out of my pocket, peeled off the two fifties Nitti had given me. A braver man would’ve tossed them in Nitti’s face. He’d also be a dumber man, and possibly a deader one. Maybe if I had the integrity Nitti was talking about, I’d turn the bills into confetti and toss them out my office window; or give ’em to the first down-and-outer on the street I ran across. But I needed a new suit, so I went out and bought one. The rest of the money could go for luxuries. Like eating and the phone bill.

  Some of Nitti’s money I decided to blow on Barney Ross and his girl Pearl. I called him over at the Morrison and he said he and Pearl were planning to go out for a bite, but had no special plans. So I drove over and picked ’em up and took Pearl and her smart green dress and Barney and his blue bow tie to my favorite restaurant in the city, Pete’s Steaks.

  Pete’s was on Dearborn, just north of Randolph. Pretty redhead
ed Pearl, on Barney’s arm, tried to hide her surprise as we approached the place; the neon sign that hung above the awning had a few vowels burned out, so that it read P T ’S STE KS, and looking in the window all you could see was an ordinary white-tile, one-arm joint. But then we went inside, and back to the rear of the place and up the steps to the air-cooled dining room, where framed autographed celebrity photos (including one from Barney, signed to Bill and Marie Botham, the owners—I never did find out who Pete was) rode the walls of the long, narrow dining-car-like room.

  As soon as Pearl started spotting celebrities (Eddie Cantor and George Jessel were at a table together and, at another, second time today, Rudy Vallee) she brightened. The place catered to the show biz crowd, press agents, song boosters, chorines, vaudevillians, with a good number of newspapermen tossed in in the bargain. Doc Dwyer of the Examiner, Hal Davis of the News, and Jim Doherty of the Trib were here tonight, and probably some others I didn’t recognize.

  Our table conversation ran to small talk—Barney had taken Pearl to the fair today, including Sally Rand’s matinee, which Pearl found “shameless,” but sort of giggled when she said it—and I mostly just listened. But Barney was watching me close; he knew I was in a black mood. He also knew I’d called and invited him and Pearl out to try to shake that mood, and that I wasn’t being particularly successful.

  The steaks arrived and helped distract me. Thick and tender and juicy, with melted butter and a side concoction of cottage fries, radishes, green onions, peas and sliced Bermuda onions that spilled onto the steak. I’d eaten nothing today except a bagel at the deli under my office, when I’d got back from Nitti’s; it’d been all I could make myself eat. But I was ravenous, now, and I attacked the rare steak like an enemy. Pearl, fortunately, didn’t notice my rotten table manners; she was too caught up in her own Pete’s Special. Barney, though, continued to eye me.

  A minor sportswriter from the Times, whose name I didn’t remember, buttonholed Barney on the way out, and I stood and talked to Pearl at the top of the stairs.

  “You’re a very special friend to Barney,” she said.

  “He’s a special friend to me.”

  “When you’re in Barney’s position, the friends you had before you got famous are the important ones, you know.”

  “Are you going to marry him, Pearl?”

  “If he asks me.”

  “He will.”

  She gave me a pretty smile, and I managed to give one back to her. A smile, that is. I doubt it was pretty.

  I drove them back to the Morrison, and let them out, but Barney leaned in the window on the rider’s side before I pulled away.

  “Are you going to be all right, Nate?”

  “Sure.”

  “You want I should drop up tonight, and we can talk?”

  “No. It’s okay. You only got tonight and tomorrow night before Pearl goes home. Spend your time with her, you bum.”

  “You sure, Nate?”

  “Sure I’m sure—now, go be with your girl!”

  “Thanks for supper, Nate.”

  I smiled and waved and pulled away.

  Pete’s special steak, good as it was, was grinding in my stomach. I passed some gas and it smelled the way I felt.

  There was a place in the alley behind the building where Barney let me park my Chevy. I’d been lucky—no vandals or thieves had had at it yet. During the winter, it was hell to start ’er up, on the really cold days; but on the really cold days I tried to work out of my office, anyway. A telephone’s a detective’s best tool, after all; and I was like anybody born and brought up in Chicago—I was more comfortable riding the Els and streetcars, and didn’t use the car much, really.

  I stopped in Barney’s Cocktail Lounge for a beer, thinking about how you used to go into the place through the corner deli. The cocktail lounge had been a blind pig, a bar that seemed to be closed down and boarded up but was actually wide open, like Chicago. Somehow I missed sitting by the boarded-up windows. It had felt safe, secure, snug, somehow. I rarely took one of the window booths, these days. Tonight I sat along the wall.

  After the beer, I had some rum. Just enough to settle my stomach. The warmth moved through my belly in a soothing wave. I felt better. I had a little more rum. Not too much. Sally was going to stop by this evening, after her show. She said she wanted to see how the other half lived, and I guessed it was time she found out, Murphy bed and all. But the least I could do was greet her soberly.

  I sat there, sipping the rum, and felt so goddamn depressed I could cry. I got out of there before I did.

  I walked up the stairs to my floor and down the hall and worked the key in the lock and stepped in and a fist sunk in my stomach and bounced off my spine. I fell on my knees and puked. Heard the door shut behind me.

  “Did you get any on you?” a hushed voice said.

  He meant me puking.

  “Yeah, shit.” An arm wiped itself off on my back; I was still doubled over, retching, but nothing was coming out, now. A mulligan stew of steak, potatoes, radishes, peas and onions shimmered before me. It smelled foul and a little like rum.

  A hand grabbed the small of one my arms and dragged me away from the pool of puke. So they wouldn’t get any more on them.

  I looked up. The office was dark, just some neon glow coming in and making orange pulsing shadows on the craggy indistinct face under the fedora before me. The other guy was behind me, hooking his arms through mine, pulling me back, though I remained on my knees. The craggy-faced guy with neon on his face had something in his hand, something like a piece of tube only limp. It drooped, like a big phallus.

  He raised his arm, quickly, and the thing in his hand swished. Then it swished again as he curved it across my chest.

  A rubber hose.

  “Fuck!” I said.

  The arms behind my arms pulled back. “Take it like a man,” a voice said. Kind of a whiny, upper-register voice. “Take your goddamn medicine.”

  The guy in front of me hit me about the body with the rubber pipe, my chest, my stomach, my arms, my shoulders. Not my face.

  Then the guy behind me pulled me up, stood me up on shaky legs, and the neon-faced guy worked over my legs.

  I took it like a man. Like any man would. I cried my fucking eyes out.

  All I could hear was their breathing and the swish of the hose and my own whimpering. This went on forever—for three minutes at least—and then I heard something else.

  A voice.

  Barney’s.

  “Nate,” he said, “are you in there?”

  “Barney!” I yelled.

  I looked over and he was peeking in the door and night vision and what little light there was allowed him to finally make out what was going on and he moved across the room and pulled the guy off my back and I could hear him belt the guy back there while I found the strength to smack the guy with the rubber hose in the mush with a fist on the end of an arm that had gone numb from pain anyway. He swung the hose and I took the blow on my forearm, but moved the hose and his arm out of the way while I butted him in the face with my head.

  The sound of him landing on his ass was music. There was still an orange neon glow on his face, but bright red mingled there as well. I must’ve broke his fucking nose. I went to kick him in the balls and he grabbed my foot and threw me into my desk. The desk slid, banged up against the wall by the windows and the phone and desk lamp tumbled off and landed noisily and, holding his bleeding nose, the guy headed unsurely for the door. His panicked friend had Barney in a clinch, using his size to squeeze Barney and keep from getting hit anymore.

  The bleeding guy was to the doorway, when he turned and said, “Toss him!” to his friend, and his friend threw Barney over at me and we were in a pile together. Barney’s guy slipped in my puke on the way out and took a fall on his face, then picked himself up and was gone. I would’ve laughed, if I hadn’t had the sense of humor beat out of me.

  Barney got up slowly and shook himself—he’d taken a hard k
nock against the desk—and started to go after them, but by that time the sound of their feet slapping down the corridor had disappeared. He went to the window and looked down.

  “Damn!” he said. “Someone’s out front with a car for ’em! There they go…damn!”

  Shaking his head, he walked over and switched on the light by the door. I was still sprawled against the desk like a rag doll. Barney looked a little mussed up, still wearing his suit and bow tie, though the bow tie was sideways, now. I probably looked like shit.

  He bent over me, touched the side of my face gently. “You look like shit.”

  I tried to smile. Couldn’t.

  “I was worried about you, Nate. Thought I’d better check in and see how you were doing. I guess I found out.”

  I said something. Not a word. A sound.

  “Nate, I’m going to put the Murphy bed down and get you stretched out on it so you can take it easy.”

  I made a sound. Affirmative sound.

  Then he was setting me gently down on top of the blankets on the Murphy bed. The overhead light was in my eyes and I winced at it, turned my head. He went over and quickly moved the desk back in place, picked up the phone, and the desk lamp, which he turned on.

  “Something isn’t broken, anyway,” he said, with a little smile.

  He went over and turned off the overhead light. Then into my washroom over by the door and dampened a washcloth and cooled my face with it. My face was the only place they hadn’t hit me, but the cloth felt good just the same.

  “There’s a doc in residence at the Morrison,” he said. “I’ll call him and get him over here.”

  I tried to swallow; my mouth felt like cotton.

  He was over at the phone when I managed to say, “No.”

  He looked back puzzled, then came over and sat on the edge of the bed. “No doc?”

  “No broken bones,” I said. “Just gonna be sore…”

  “I think you should see a doc.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  He didn’t like that, but he didn’t press. “You want the cops?” he said.

  “That was cops.”