Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  WITNESS: Yes.

  JACK: I show you a photograph made by a news cameraman at the scene of this incident on the night in question. What is happening in the picture?

  WITNESS: It looks like we’re putting the cuffs on the subject.

  JACK: What is that on Lieutenant Gallagher’s head?

  WITNESS: A cap.

  JACK: Is it standard police procedure, after subduing a suspect in a violent struggle, to put his hat back on his head before handcuffing him?

  WITNESS: No.

  JACK: Officer Sebring, isn’t it a fact that there was no struggle to get Lieutenant Gallagher out of the cruiser? And isn’t it a fact that you and your partner picked an unconscious Phil Gallagher up off the ground where he had fallen after being tripped? And didn’t he fall several yards away from his cruiser, near the school building? And isn’t it also a fact that you or your partner, or both of you, then searched in the darkness until you found his cap, which had fallen off when he was tripped, and that you then jammed his cap back on his head and carried him, limp and unconscious, back to his cruiser, where you hastily handcuffed him as you observed the approach of the news media?

  WITNESS (glaring in anger): No!

  JACK (after a silence): Tell me, Randy, did you two fellows slip LSD into his mouth then, or was the LSD somebody put in his thermos of coffee enough to do the trick?

  PROSECUTOR: Objection—

  JACK: I withdraw the question.

  An expert witness confirmed Gallagher’s story from scientific evidence. There were traces of LSD in Gallagher’s thermos bottle. Gallagher’s fingerprints were not on the packets of LSD found in his pocket.

  WITNESS: There were no fingerprints of any kind on Gallagher’s service revolver.

  JACK: What does that suggest to you, Dr. Garrett?

  WITNESS: The possibility that the weapon had been wiped clean of fingerprints.

  The wax test on Gallagher’s right hand and arm, designed to show whether he had recently fired a handgun, was negative. There was a bruise on the back of Gallagher’s head that was consistent with a blow from a nightstick or blackjack. Fragments of asphalt and slag removed from scrapes on his knees, elbows, and palms matched similar material from the school yard.

  Jack then called the head of the vice squad, who testified that the mother of the fifteen-year-old girl, a woman named Whisper Fisk, had been arrested twenty-three times in the past ten years for prostitution. She worked as an exotic dancer and hostess in the Blue Grotto, a bar and restaurant where Fats Corso spent most of his evenings. Although the Blue Grotto was legally owned by Corso’s two sisters, it was widely believed that Fats was the real owner.

  JACK: Lieutenant Karp, I will ask you this: To your official knowledge, has the name Domenico D. Corso, also known as Fats Corso, ever been linked in any police investigation to the illegal practice of prostitution in this city?

  WITNESS: Yes, sir. Fifteen times from 1933 to 1945.

  JACK: How many times did these charges lead to trial and conviction?

  WITNESS: Never.

  JACK: Why was that, Lieutenant?

  WITNESS: Insufficient proof.

  JACK: Isn’t it a fact, Lieutenant, that Mr. Corso runs prostitution in this town?

  WITNESS: I couldn’t swear to that, sir.

  JACK: Will you swear now, before this jury, that Mr. Corso does not run prostitution in this town, and was not running it every time Whisper Fisk was arrested for soliciting for prostitution?

  WITNESS: I couldn’t swear to that, either.

  JACK: Was Whisper Fisk ever released on bail after being arrested for soliciting for prostitution?

  WITNESS: Yes.

  JACK: I hand you an abstract of the records of the Municipal Court in regard to all such charges against one Eleanor R. Fisk, also known as Whisper Fisk. Will you read the name of the person who furnished bond in each and every case?

  WITNESS: It was always the same person, Domenico D. Corso.

  The jury deliberated for forty-two minutes before acquitting Lieutenant Phil Gallagher on all counts. Jack immediately filed a $50 million civil lawsuit against Fats Corso on the Gallaghers’ behalf.

  6 Walking to work the following morning with a large retinue of reporters, Jack was asked by a writer if he was going to forgo his share of the judgment if he won.

  “The money is meaningless,” Jack said. “I just want to get Fats Corso under oath.”

  The writer was from New York. His profile of Jack, “Young Man with a Future,” ran the following week in a national magazine. Jack was interviewed on Good Morning America and on two network magazine shows. Jack was completely at his ease in a television studio. The camera liked him: It was at this point that it began to be noticed that Jack had the quality, common to stars, of looking better in pictures than in life. Jack knew that the media’s attention span was fleeting, and that hot as he was, he would soon be replaced by someone hotter. But he had become part of the media’s consciousness, which meant that they would revisit him in the future. In commercial breaks he made friends with the producers, who would remember him. He was unfailingly polite to the smiling, overdressed interviewers, all of whom asked him the same five questions, usually in exactly the same words, as if they were all wired to some invisible mothership that was whispering into their earpieces.

  Through Gruesome contacts, Jack had already made friends with the governor of Ohio. A week after the Gallagher trial, he was appointed counsel to a new Governor’s Task Force on Organized Crime. He immediately called for an all-out investigation of Corso. His position gave him access to most of the state’s files on Corso. Jack leaked selected bits of this confidential data to investigative reporters. The material, like most raw investigative files, was mostly gossip and hearsay and the rancorous accusations of enemies who believed that their identities, if not their words, would remain secret, and for that reason it made excellent newspaper copy. Although Jack was never identified as a source, his name and picture popped up in the stories.

  So notable was this burst of notoriety and its consequences that Peter himself attended my first post-trial meeting with Morgan, at a picnic table in a roadside park in West Virginia. We lunched on Kentucky Fried Chicken, for which Peter, epicure though he was, had a secret taste—as did the vicious, tiny blackflies that plagued us.

  “Jack,” said Morgan, “wants to change the plan.”

  Peter never registered surprise, but Morgan’s words caused him to close his eyes in momentary displeasure. Finally he said, “In what way?”

  “In almost every important way,” Morgan said.

  “Continue,” Peter said.

  Morgan did so, in her most neutral voice. Jack had never accepted the slow, rung-by-rung climb up the political ladder that Peter had envisaged for him. Local offices, being close to the people, were not stepping-stones but stumbling blocks; most people elected to city councils or even to mayoralties never rose higher. That was because petty officials had a duty to resolve petty disputes, and there was no better way to make political enemies. Jack’s plan was different: make a splash with a big early success, claim an issue that lets you pursue an enemy of the people, and as soon as your name is big enough, run for an office that seems to be out of your reach. Jack had attorney general of Ohio in mind, then lieutenant governor, then governor.

  “This will take less than ten years,” Morgan said.

  “He can do it?”

  “He thinks so,” said Morgan. “And he may be right. Look at the record. He’s made a big splash; he’s a media figure. He has his issue, Jack Adams, Nemesis of the Mob. And he has an enemy the whole world loves to hate, Fats Corso. The personification of evil, the demon who wants to make every child a dope addict, every little girl a hooker, every father a helpless slave to gambling.”

  “Is that an issue that will make a president?” Peter asked.

  “Issues don’t make presidents,” Morgan replied. “Publicity does.”

  “Brilliant!” Peter’s eyes we
lled with sudden admiration. “Is that your phrase?” he asked.

  “No, it’s pure Jack.”

  The blackflies were swarming around our heads. With frantic gesticulations we batted them away, slapping one another to kill them; had the FBI been watching from a distance, we would have looked like three deaf people having a violent argument. I did not want to prolong the conversation, but I felt that a devil’s advocate was needed.

  I said, “I join in the admiration. Jack is clever. Jack is good. But what this shows is, he is beginning to think he doesn’t need us. He is putting himself in a position to succeed without us. It would be a mistake to let him have what he wants in this case.”

  “Even if what he wants is to our advantage?”

  “That’s the question. Is it? Or is it his way of slipping the leash? This is a serious issue of handling.”

  To my surprise, Peter immediately agreed, although it took him a long time to respond because he was deep in thought. “Very well, he has played leapfrog with us,” he said at last, with a slight excess of English idiom. “And now we must show him that turnabout is fair play.”

  He then described how Jack was to be taught a lesson. Reminded of the leash. For the first time since Majorca, Morgan looked her original radiant self. This was the work that she liked: action, deception, violent shocks to the system. Secret results that were mistaken for something they were not.

  7 By football season, when the Ohio consciousness focused on the gridiron, Jack had turned Fats Corso’s life into a living hell. The remorseless publicity that had enlivened the slow-news summer months had forced a police investigation. Bored detectives and sheriff’s deputies in parked Fords, not to mention an occasional team of dapper FBI agents in somewhat better cars, joined the media shock troops who swarmed around the Mafia chieftain. He seldom ventured outside without being pursued by shouting reporters.

  Fats rarely stepped out onto the pavement without sending a scout in advance. Georgie Angels, Corso’s driver, usually played this role. If the coast was clear, Georgie would go back and knock on the door. Corso would then emerge, white fedora pulled down over his eyes, and walk with leisurely step toward his snow-white Cadillac Brougham, which was always parked at the curb. It was evident to onlookers that this nonchalant, unhurried pace was an effort, that Fats’s nervous system was ordering his body to scuttle for cover while his street smarts were commanding it to remember who it was and not show anxiety. There was something perversely sad about this spectacle of a hit man terrorized like a moth by klieg lights, and something mysteriously American about it, too. Fats’s nickname was a cruel joke: He was and always had been painfully skinny, with knobby knees and elbows and a large spherical skull, and when he was chased down the street by shouting reporters, his great pumpkin head bobbed heavily on its fragile stalk of a neck.

  The Cadillac was equipped with a special remote-control device that permitted Corso to start the engine from a distance of several yards. Instantaneously, in response to a radio signal, the powerful motor would fire, the radio would switch on, and, if it was night, the car’s headlamps and interior lights would come on, too. When all this happened a look of pride and happiness would flash across Fats’s skull-like face. He loved this gadget.

  One morning just before dawn, an hour when Corso was seldom bothered by journalists and the cops tended to be asleep in their parked cars, Georgie Angels conducted his usual surveillance. He failed to note a freelance television cameraman who was shooting with a long lens from the roof of the building across the street. Believing himself unobserved, Georgie knocked on the door of the club as usual. Fats Corso immediately emerged, remote control in hand. When he pointed it at the parked Cadillac, it blew up in a huge fireball, sending parts of the car spinning above the rooftops and shattering every windowpane in the deserted block.

  The shock wave blew Georgie Angels backward into Fats. The fall broke Fats’s left leg and dislocated vertebrae in his neck. Georgie Angels suffered a scalp wound that transformed his coarse but handsome movie-mobster face into a mask of blood. This made a page 1 newspaper photograph that was even more dramatic than the footage of the actual explosion that the cameraman sold to every station in Ohio, and many others across the country.

  How did the cameraman happen to be there at such a dramatic moment? “I just had a feeling,” he said. “So I threw a couple of cameras in the car and went on down to the Blue Grotto.”

  Actually he had been tipped off by an anonymous caller, but because he was, at least technically, a journalist, his improbable explanation was accepted without question by the rest of the media.

  Naturally Jack was asked, during his morning walk the following day, for an opinion. He said, “Maybe the rest of the boys are getting a little nervous about Fats Corso.”

  “How about you, Jack? Does this make you nervous?”

  “Why should it? Nobody has sent me any flowers.”

  The reporters laughed. This was a reference to a page 1 picture in that morning’s newspaper, showing Corso in his hospital bed, long meager leg in traction, neck in a brace, surrounded by banks of floral tributes and baskets of Italian delicacies whose combined cost was estimated by the newspaper at not less than two thousand dollars.

  Jack’s quip made the noontime news and went out over the wires. That evening, when he arrived home, he found a large horseshoe of white lilies on his front porch. The gilt lettering on the red ribbon read, Good Luck, Jack.

  Jack’s viscera leapt and twisted; as always in moments of extreme fright, he tasted vomit. And as always he kept his composure in front of the newspeople. He posed for pictures with the wreath, even made a joke or two. But once inside the house he gave way to terror. Memories of gunfire and mayhem escaped from the psychic attic in which Jack had locked them and came tumbling down the stairs of his conscious mind: blood, noise, flying glass, flame, Greta’s dance with death. After many frantic phone calls he finally reached Morgan at an abortion rights meeting. She listened in silence to what he had to tell her.

  After a moment she said, “Get a grip on yourself, Jack.”

  In a trembling voice Jack replied, “Get a grip on myself? Thanks a lot. I mean, that’s really a big help.”

  “Jack, what makes you think that wreath came from the Mafia?”

  “Who else would it have come from? Lilies, Morgan. Lilies. It’s got Mob written all over it.”

  “Jack, stop,” Morgan said. “Corso is in traction, for God’s sake. He’s the one who’s scared shitless.”

  Jack’s heart rate slowed. He took several deep breaths, pumping oxygen into his system as Danny had taught him to do years before. Morgan could hear this over the wire.

  Jack said, “I’m alone here, you know.”

  “Well, Jesus, Jack, what do you want me to do—send a SWAT team of women to join hands around the house?”

  Jack hung up and dialed Danny’s home number. He had to look it up because he had never called it before; it was part of Cindy’s deal with Danny that she would never even have to talk to Jack or Morgan over the phone. Cindy answered.

  Jack said, “Danny Miller, please.”

  Of course Cindy recognized his voice. There was a silence. After a moment, Danny came on the line. In his mind’s eye Jack saw Cindy, cold and angry, handing the phone to Danny without a word. Jack told Danny what had happened.

  Danny laughed. Then he said, “Be right over.”

  When Morgan got home, she found Jack and Danny in the kitchen, playing gin rummy. All the doors were locked, all the shades were drawn. The horseshoe of lilies was propped up in the kitchen sink, as if it were a joke, but at the same time it blocked the kitchen window, the only window in the house without a shade.

  Morgan said, “Hi. Who’s winning?”

  “Jack,” said Danny, a mild slur in his voice. Half a dozen empty beer cans were strewed on the tabletop.

  Morgan said, “Do you need a ride home, Danny?”

  Jack said, “I’ll ride along.”

&
nbsp; Morgan and Danny exchanged a look. Danny said, “I’ll be fine.”

  He heaved himself to his feet, and with the smile—half affection and half exasperation—that he reserved for Jack in his friend’s weak moments, he gave Jack’s shoulder a little shake of reassurance.

  8 After Fats Corso’s Cadillac blew up in the early morning and Crime Fighter Jack Adams was so blatantly threatened with bodily harm by the Man in the Shadows, the county prosecutor at last impaneled a special grand jury to look into the many possibilities of indicting Corso. This prosecutor was F. Merriwether Street, the tall, plodding man who had been Jack’s adversary in the Phil Gallagher trial. Street’s decision to go to a grand jury was, in theory, a secret, but Jack learned of it from his sources in the Gruesome. Street had sewn up the Republican nomination for Ohio attorney general, and the grand jury was his way of grabbing the credit for busting the rackets. He had won office the first time on Nixon’s coattails, and to everyone’s astonishment had been reelected over a smart, perhaps too smart, liberal.

  Street was planning to announce the grand jury on a Monday in late November. On the Sunday before that, Jack ran into Street in the stadium men’s room line at halftime of the Michigan game; Michigan was winning again. This was a matter of indifference to the inner Jack, but outwardly he was as glum as everyone else in the shuffling queue of cursing, disgusted Ohioans. Street was standing behind Jack, so several minutes passed before Jack turned around and saw the prosecutor staring down on him from his six foot six inches. His look was cold and contemptuous, as if he had recently blackballed Jack’s application for membership in the country club and there was no possible way of Jack ever finding this out. Street was deeply conscious that he and Jack were from opposite ends of the social spectrum. He had gone to Harvard as an undergraduate, then to law school at Ohio State, as had his father and grandfather, who were, respectively, founding partner and managing partner of Street, Frew, Street & Merriwether, a most prestigious local law firm. He was a member of Porcellian. He did not consider that people like Jack and Morgan, who held graduate degrees from Harvard, had gone to the real Harvard.