True Crime

by Collins, Max Allan

  I left it at that.

  At the end of the hallway was a little vestibule; the door within the vestibule said 737, with a little gold plaque that said Presidential Suite below it. I stood to one side of the door, within the vestibule, and cold-eyed Campagna stood to the other. He stood with his arms loose at his sides, big hands free.

  “Wish I could find a suit like that,” I said. “I can’t find one a gun won’t bulge under.”

  He said, “You couldn’t afford my tailor.”

  I shrugged. “Probably not.”

  It occurred to me then that he hadn’t patted me down for a gun; he could tell just looking at me I wasn’t armed—the suit I had on wasn’t tailored well enough to conceal one. Grooming hints from the underworld.

  The door opened and a fat little man with wire-frame glasses, a loud tie and a black silk suit came out, smiling, calling back behind him, “Always a pleasure, Frank!”

  Campagna reached over and shut the door for the fat little man, who put his hat on and was going past me when I said, “How you doing, Willie?”

  Willie Bioff squinted behind his wire-frames, then said, “Heller?”

  “That’s right.”

  He smirked. “How’s it feel to be an ex-cop?”

  “How’s it feel to be an ex-pimp?”

  The smirk shifted to a sneer. “Once a smart-ass always a smart-ass.”

  “Once a pimp always a pimp.”

  Bioff thought about doing something about my mouth. I knew he wouldn’t. He was a former union slugger, but known for doing his slugging with a blackjack from behind. And in his pimp days he was famous for slapping his whores around. I’d arrested him, back in my plainclothes days, for that very act. Right before I was assigned to the pickpocket detail, I’d accompanied one of Chicago’s honest detectives, William Shoemaker, “Old Shoes” himself, on a brothel raid. We’d caught Willie going down the back stairs with a tally sheet, and when we hauled him back upstairs and one of his girls admitted Willie was her pimp, he’d hauled off and slugged her. We got a six-month conviction on the little bastard, but he never served it. Chicago.

  Bioff was still standing there, trying to decide if he should get tough—maybe thinking Campagna would back him up. But then Bioff had no way of knowing why I was present; maybe I was on Nitti’s team, too, and he better not risk messing with me. He was nothing if not a coward.

  Bioff said, “We should let bygones be bygones,” and waddled quickly off.

  “I hate that little pimp,” I said.

  Campagna looked at me impassively, then his tight mouth turned up at one corner. I took that to be a sign of agreement, and a possible softening of the tension between us. Still, if Nitti ever wanted me dead, Campagna would probably push to the front of the line to get the job.

  For now he pointed one of his shotgun-barrel fingers at me and said, “Wait here—I’ll see how Frank’s doing.”

  I waited; it was just a matter of seconds and Campagna was back, saying, “Frank wants to know if your business is private.”

  “Pardon?”

  Campagna looked faintly disgusted again. “Can you talk in front of anybody, or is it for Frank’s ears only?”

  “Frank’s ears only,” I said.

  Campagna nodded and went back in, came right out, said, “It’ll be just a few minutes. Frank’s getting a haircut.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  We stood there for a while, on either side of the door.

  Suddenly Campagna said, “Me, too.”

  “What?”

  “I hate that little pimp, too. Bioff. You want a cigar?”

  “Uh, no thanks.”

  Campagna took out a cigar as thick as one of his fingers and lit it. It smelled pretty good, as cigars go. There were guys all over town who’d give their soul for a job that paid per day what that cigar cost.

  Not that I blamed Campagna for enjoying himself; in his business, life was sometimes short—why not enjoy it while you had it? And I was grateful for the gesture he’d made—some human contact between me and him, however slight, might be good for my health. At least now I didn’t figure he’d be wanting to be first in line to bump me off.

  The door opened suddenly and a white-smocked, skinny, swarthy man with a pencil-thin mustache and slick hair came rushing out, saying “’Cusa, ’cusa,” and shutting the door quickly behind him. Something smashed against that door—something glass, shattering.

  The man, a barber apparently, seemed frightened but Campagna stopped him before he could run away and gave him a fin, saying, “You’re lucky to get it.”

  The barber nodded, his eyes wide, terrified, and scurried off down the hall.

  Campagna, his mouth turned up at either corner, genuinely amused now, pointed a thumb at the door and said, “Frank said you could go in as soon as his barber came out. So you can go on in, Heller.”

  I swallowed. “You’re too good to me, Campagna.”

  Campagna actually grinned for a moment—the first indication I’d had since knowing him that he had teeth—and opened the door and I went inside.

  Glass shards from a small hand mirror crunched under my feet as I entered the plushly carpeted living room of the suite. Nitti was standing looking in a wall mirror, a white barber’s gown tucked in his collar; he was touching his hair, looking at himself with disapproval.

  “Come in, Heller,” he said, not looking at me. “Find a seat.”

  There was a high-backed chair near a sofa in this white-appointed, gold-trimmed, rather Victorian-looking suite. Black hair trimmings peppered the white carpet near the chair, so I sat on the sofa.

  Nitti yanked the white gown from under his neck and pitched it behind him as he walked over to the chair and sat, placing his hands on his knees. He was in gray pants and a white shirt. His suitcoat and tie were on a coffee table nearby, but he didn’t put them on. He was shaking his head.

  “They don’t make ’em like they used to,” he said.

  “Uh, what’s that, Frank?”

  “Barbers. That little cocksucker makes more money off me in fifteen minutes than I got in a week, when I was in the business, and look what he does to me!” He gestured to his immaculately cut black hair, slicked back, parted at the left, perfect.

  “It looks pretty good to me, Frank.”

  “Does it? Well, maybe I’m too fussy. That’s the fifth barber I tried this year. And they all got the same goddamn problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Their goddamn hands are shaking! Look—” He bent over and tipped his head to one side, folded his ear back; a little red showed. “I’m fuckin’ bleeding! They ain’t barbers, they’re butchers! In my day, a barber had hands like this—” And he held his hands out straight in front of him and demonstrated how rock-steady they were.

  “Maybe they’re intimidated, Frank.”

  That seemed to confound him. “What the hell for?”

  “Well,” I said. “They’re cutting Frank Nitti’s hair. There’s a certain amount of pressure in that, don’t you think?”

  He thought about that, nodded. “I never thought of it. But you’re right, Heller. It could make a barber nervous, knowin’ he’s cuttin’ another barber’s hair. You may be right. Now.” He slapped his knees. “What’s this about?”

  “I’m here for a favor—if you’re willing to grant one.”

  He shrugged expansively. “You know I owe you, kid. From way back.”

  “Well, I don’t figure you owe me. But if you’d do this for me, I could maybe owe you.”

  “You don’t sound nuts about owing me, kid.”

  I admitted I wasn’t. “I would like to ask that if you ever call my marker in,” I said, “you’ll restrict it to more or less legal services. Maybe sometime you could use some investigating and wouldn’t want to use your own people—something on the q.t. I could be your man. No fee, no questions asked.”

  He nodded, smiling rather absently, almost to himself. “Maybe I ought to quit thinking of you as
a kid, Heller. You seem to’ve grown up on me, when I wasn’t lookin’.”

  I smiled at him. “You’re always looking, Frank.”

  He laughed, the haircut forgotten. “You got that right. Look, I am grateful to you for that last little job you did for me.”

  I didn’t know what he meant; I didn’t say so, but he could see it in my face.

  “You know,” he said, gesturing with one open hand. “When I gave you that C to mind your own business.”

  He meant Dillinger; I was wearing the suit I’d used part of the money on.

  “That’s okay, Frank.”

  “You coulda gone to the papers, coulda found some news-hound who’d paid you good dough for your story. I ain’t sure anybody woulda believed you, but it’s nice that story never got told. Coulda made a ripple or two in the lake. And ripples can turn into waves, if you ain’t careful.”

  “Lake’s real calm these days, Frank.”

  “I know. Let’s keep it that way. Now. What favor you need?”

  “Remember a guy named Candy Walker?”

  Nitti nodded, and I told him my story. Told him Walker’s current moll was a client’s daughter and that client wanted me to try to retrieve her before she got caught in a crossfire somewhere.

  I said, “Walker’s running with the Barkers, I understand.”

  Nitti confirmed that. “That little penny-ante outfit’s come a long way. They’re in real tight with some of our friends in St. Paul.”

  By “our,” he meant the Outfit’s friends, not his and mine. And those friends were the Twin Cities branch of the Syndicate and various corrupt politicians on the municipal and even the state level.

  “I, uh, figured you might’ve had some dealings with the Barkers.”

  He eyed me shrewdly. “How’d you figure that?”

  “Can I speak frankly?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, when Shotgun Ziegler bought it in Cicero, I figured the Boys either did it or approved it.”

  Ziegler, a Capone gunman said to be one of the bogus “cops” who gunned down Bugs Moran’s boys in a North Side garage on Saint Valentine’s Day back in ’29, had been cut in half, his head blasted into fragments, by four shotguns outside his favorite Cicero café this past March. Like Baby Face Nelson and Candy Walker, Ziegler had been a Capone soldier who defected in post-Repeal days to the army of outlaws, specifically the Barker-Karpis gang. Word was he had engineered the Hamm kidnapping for the Barkers—one of several crimes Melvin Purvis tried to pin on the Touhy mob, incidentally—but in the kidnapping’s aftermath the Barkers had soured on Ziegler.

  Nitti smiled humorlessly and leaned forward, his legs apart, his hands loosely clasped together, dangling between his knees. “Let me tell you about Mr. Ziegler. A lesson can be learned, there. He drank too much. You ever see me drink too much, Heller?”

  “I can’t recall seeing you drink at all, Frank.”

  “Right! I’m a businessman, Heller, mine is a business like any other. And businessmen don’t get in their fuckin’ cups and tell tales out of school.”

  “Ziegler told tales out of school.”

  Nitti nodded, still smiling, still without humor. “He was hangin’ out at saloons and braggin’ about his accomplishments. Startin’ with a certain accomplishment that dates back to February of ’29, if you get my drift. Right up to a couple of more recent accomplishments—namely, snatches. And I don’t mean he was braggin’ about gettin’ laid.”

  He meant the Hamm and Bremer kidnappings, said to be the work of the Barber-Karpis gang (said by everybody but Melvin Purvis and his “G-men,” that is).

  “Frank, I think you know I can keep my mouth shut. So if you’re willing to put me in touch with Candy Walker—or put me in touch with somebody who could put me in touch with Candy Walker—I sure wouldn’t go spreading your Barker connection around.”

  “I know you wouldn’t, Heller. I trust you. Besides, if you did, you’d wind up in an alley.”

  I breathed out heavily. “Fair enough. Will you help me out?”

  He stood. He walked across the room to the bar and poured himself some soda water on ice; he offered me some and I said no thanks. He came back and sat and sipped the soda water, which bubbled in his glass like the thoughts in my brain.

  Nitti was thinking too. Finally he said, “I could help you. But the best favor I could do you is not to.”

  I sat up. “Why’s that, Frank?”

  “Haven’t you thought this through, kid?”

  So now I was a “kid” again.

  “Well, yes…”

  “Don’t you realize your name was in the papers, associated with the Dillinger kill? As far as some of these dumb-ass farmer-outlaws are concerned, you helped set their pal up for the feds. You helped kill Johnny Dillinger.”

  “I realize that…”

  “How were you plannin’ to go about lookin’ for this girl, then?”

  “You’re saying if I go around asking questions of Candy Walker and his associates under my own name, I’ll run into somebody who might want to do me in.”

  “No,” Nitti said, shaking a finger at me like a disappointed schoolteacher, “you’ll run into everybody who might wanna do you in.”

  “I figured if I could restrict my investigating to Chicago…”

  “Candy Walker ain’t in Chicago.”

  I sighed. “I didn’t figure there’d be much chance of that.”

  “You’re probably gonna have to go out among them apple-knockers to find that girl. And you can’t go out as, what’s your first name again?”

  “Nathan.”

  “You can’t go out as Nathan Heller, private cop that helped get Dillinger. Not without comin’ back in one or more boxes.”

  “I guess I knew that.”

  “Got any ideas?”

  I sighed again. “I could go out under a phony name. You know—undercover.”

  Nitti lifted an eyebrow, nodded. “Like that fed your pal Ness sent around to suck up to Al. That guy sure looked, talked and acted like a real wop.”

  I nodded too. “Yeah—and his testimony had a lot to do with putting Capone away.”

  Nitti smiled, a little. “Maybe I should thank that guy—he made me what I am today.”

  “Some people think Capone is still running things from behind bars.”

  “He’s in Alcatraz now. You don’t run shit from Alcatraz.”

  “Anyway, it can be done. Going undercover.”

  “Yeah, but it’d be good and goddamn dangerous. I’d have to hand it to you, kid, if you pulled that off.”

  “Would you be willing to help me do it?”

  Not smiling, he tipped his head back, narrowed his eyes. “How?”

  “Give me a name I can use, and a background. Somebody who’s out of circulation, in jail or whatever, who I can say I am, without risk of Candy Walker or anybody he runs with ever having met the guy. Somebody they might’ve heard of. Somebody they could call around and check up on. So I could get in and get this girl and get out again. In one piece.”

  About halfway through that, he started nodding. He was still nodding as he said, “Possible. Let me make a phone call.”

  He got up and went out of the room. I could hear his muffled voice, but not make out any of the words. Then he came back in, smiled meaninglessly and sat back down.

  “It’s fixed. I got a name for you to use.”

  “Good. Somebody in jail?”

  “Better. Somebody dead.”

  “Oh…”

  “This guy worked out East till about a year ago, when he come to work for us.”

  “Candy Walker never met him?”

  Nitti shook his head. “No, but he’s heard of him. That’s the beauty part. There’s a chance he was pointed out to Walker once or twice, but they never met.”

  “Well, if Walker saw him…”

  “The guy had plastic surgery. That’s your explanation, if it comes up—it also happens to be true.”

  “Oh—okay
. How can I prove I’m this guy?”

  “I’ll fill you in some more—I’m going to have a driver’s license in his name dropped off at your office tomorrow morning. We can make it work. A cinch.”

  “Well, uh. Thanks. I appreciate this, Frank.”

  “Actually, you’re doing me a favor.”

  “How’s that?”

  “This guy you’ll be playin’—he’s dead, but nobody knows it. Or, not many people know it. And it makes things sweeter if he’s seen walking around. It confuses the issue, see? Makes him not dead.”

  I didn’t follow this exactly, but I nodded.

  “Now,” Nitti said, writing on a white pad on the coffee table before him, “here’s an address. It’s an apartment house. You’ll go see this old hillbilly woman who lives on the ground floor. Her name’s Kate Barker.”

  “Kate Barker. Is she related to the Barker boys?”

  Nitti nodded curtly. “She’s their ma.”

  No mention of an old woman being connected to the Barker-Karpis gang had been in any of the newspaper write-ups.

  I said, “Is she aware of her boys’ business?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Does she approve of it?”

  “They can do no wrong in her eyes. She goes on the road with ’em sometimes, I’m told. But sometimes she tires of that kind of life and goes and lives in an apartment in the ‘big city.’ She’ll know where they are. Just tell her you want to connect up with her boys and Walker; she won’t care why, she’ll just do it. If she has any doubts about who you are, you have her check with one of my people, whose name I’m gonna give you.”

  He tore the sheet with the address on it off the pad; handed it to me.

  I glanced at the address.

  3967 Pine Grove.

  “Jesus—Frank, this is the apartment building where Jimmy Lawrence lived…”

  “I know,” Nitti nodded. “I own it. Or one of my companies owns it.”

  I was finding out more about Frank Nitti and his business than I wanted to; I could see me, dead in an alley.

  “She’s living in Lawrence’s apartment, by the way,” Nitti said.

  “Jesus,” I said, just staring at the white piece of paper, the address starting to blur.

  “That’s only because the previous tenant vacated,” Nitti said, smiling like a priest. “She never met Lawrence.”