Ask Not

by Max Allan Collins

  We came around to an ocean of cars—the lot held four thousand and was at capacity—but the kids hadn’t started to stream out yet, lingering inside in the afterglow of Beatle hysteria. All across the lot, parents were standing by cars, waiting, smoking, the little red tips bobbing like fireflies in the night.

  A fairly short walk away, my car was parked across from the Stock Yard Inn on South Halsted. Short walk or not, I was well aware that this was the South Side, an area tougher than a nickel steak, not that the Saddle and Sirloin Club had served up any nickel steaks lately.

  The nearby stockyards consumed a sprawling area between Pershing Road on the north, Halsted on the east, Forty-seventh on the South, and Ashland Avenue on the west—close to five hundred acres. Still, you could neither hear nor smell those thousands of doomed cattle, unless you counted the fragrant aroma wafting from the Saddle and Sirloin.

  “You want me to get that napkin framed up for you?” I asked Sam.

  “You won’t lose it or anything, will you?”

  “No. I can be trusted with evidence.”

  “That would be fab.”

  Engines starting up, mechanical coughs in the night, indicated the teenagers were finally exiting the amphitheater for their rides. The wide street was still largely empty, though, as we jaywalked across, making no effort at speed.

  We paused mid-street for a car to go by in either direction. Across from us, my dark-blue Jaguar X waited patiently, with its hubcaps and everything—not bad for this part of town.

  “I’ll just hold on to it for now,” he said, meaning the napkin. It was still in his hands like the biggest, luckiest four-leaf clover any kid ever found.

  He would be seventeen later this month, but I had that same surge of feeling for him I’d first experienced holding him in my arms at the hospital. I was studying him, trying to memorize the moment, slipping an arm around his shoulders, and he tightened, hearing the engine before I did.

  It came roaring up from our left, where somebody had been parked on the Stock Yard Inn side, a light-blue Pontiac Bonneville, screaming down the street like those girls at the amphitheater. The vehicle, even at this stupid speed, was no danger to us, but we began to move a little quicker across our lane.

  “Dad!”

  Headlights were bearing down on us. The Pontiac had swerved—not swerved, swung into our lane, as if we were its targets.

  Maybe we were.

  The damn beast was right on us and it clipped me a little but it would have been much worse if Sam hadn’t tackled me and shoved me out of harm’s way. I glimpsed a blur of a dark-complected face in the window of the Pontiac as it whipped by, dark eyes glaring at me as if I were the one who’d hit him. Well, I had, a little.

  Sam and I both landed hard on the pavement, and I had taken some impact, a glancing blow but still painful, on my left hip.

  I was on my other side and Sam was hovering, saying, “Dad, Dad” over and over, as I managed to sit up, pointing.

  “Son! Get that license number! Can you see it?”

  I was too dazed—all I could see were red halos around taillights.

  But Sam was nodding. He stared after the receding vehicle. It had disappeared by the time he got a pencil out of somewhere and jotted the number down on the back of his precious cocktail napkin, which was already rumpled and wadded from when he’d clutched his fists and tackled me to safety.

  He had tears in his eyes. I’ll never know if it was out of fear for himself or concern for me or sorrow over his ruined Beatlemania artifact.

  But I’d lay odds on the latter.

  He helped me up and drunk-walked me the few steps to the Jag. Another car went by, slow, the driver giving us a dirty look. We were just a couple of lushes lurching across the street.

  Nobody had seen the incident, at least nobody who bothered to come help or anything. I told Sam to drive, fishing out the keys for him, and he helped me into the rider’s side. Now the stream of amphitheater traffic was picking up, slowed by traffic cops. Like they say, where was a cop when you needed one?

  “I’m going to get you to a hospital,” Sam said over the purr of the Jag. “What one should I go to? I don’t know this part of town.”

  “Just get us back to Old Town. I didn’t get hit that bad.”

  “Dad, no!”

  “Son, I’ll be bruised up, and my chiropractor will make a small windfall out of me. But I’m fine. Drive.”

  We’d gone about half a block when he said, “Shouldn’t we call the cops? We should go back to that Stock Yard hotel and call the cops.”

  “No.”

  “What was wrong with that guy? Was he drunk?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “It was almost like he was trying to hit us!”

  More likely me. Sam hadn’t been on the planet long enough to make my kind of enemy.

  We stopped at an all-night drugstore to pick up some Anacin, four pills of which I popped, chasing them with a Coke. Despite all that caffeine, I was asleep when Sam pulled behind my brick three-story on Eugenie Street, one block north of North Avenue. I woke up just as he was pulling the Jag into my stable-turned-garage. The main building, par for this side street, was narrow and deep with not much of a backyard.

  I lived on the upper two floors, the ground level a furnished apartment the A-1 used for visiting clients and as a safe house. Sam was still helping me walk as we entered in back through the kitchen and across the dining room into the living room, an open space with off-white wall-to-wall carpet and a wrought-iron spiral staircase. The plaster walls, painted a rust orange, had select framed modern artwork, and one wall was a bookcase with as many LPs as books. Furnishings ran to overstuffed couches and chairs, some brown, some green.

  I settled into my brown-leather recliner and used the phone on the table where the TV Guide and remote control also lived.

  “You know, old married people like me,” my longtime partner Lou Sapperstein said gruffly, “aren’t necessarily up at this hour.”

  “It’s not even midnight. You still got friends in Motor Vehicles?”

  “I have friends everywhere, Nate. Even in Old Town.”

  “Do you have friends in Motor Vehicles who work night shift?”

  “Are you okay? You sound funny.”

  “Yeah, I’m a riot. Rowan and Martin got nothing on me. I’m going to give you a license plate to have your friend run. And I want to know right now. Not tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” Lou said, no more kidding around. “I got a pencil. Go.”

  I gave him the number.

  Twenty minutes and two glasses of rum later, I picked the phone up on first ring.

  “Pontiac Bonneville,” Lou said. “’61. Light blue.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Stolen earlier this evening.”

  “Big surprise.”

  “Found abandoned within the last half hour on the South Side.”

  “Within, say, half a mile of the International Amphitheater?”

  “You are a true detective, Nathan Heller. What’s this about?”

  “Maybe nothing. Maybe something.”

  I’d already gotten the nine millimeter from the front closet and rested it on the TV Guide.

  Lou was saying, “If there are any prints on that vehicle, we’ll know tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

  “I have friends who work Sundays. I have all sorts of friends.”

  “This is where I came in,” I said, thanked him, and hung up.

  Sam was sitting on the nearby couch, leaning forward, hands clasped. He looked worried. A little afraid. He’d watched me go to the shelf to fetch the Browning automatic and its presence in the room, near my reach, was palpable.

  “What’s this about, Dad?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe a joyrider. Or a drunk. Or a husband who didn’t like the art-study photos I took of him for his wife.”

  Sam was well aware of what I did for a living, though we both knew
it had been a long, long time since I had shot pictures through motel windows. Although my agents still did.

  “Dad, are you sure you’re all right? I think we should get you to an emergency room.”

  “An emergency room at a Chicago hospital on a Saturday night? That’s more dangerous than that street we crossed.”

  He smiled a little. “That was a close one. That was terrible.”

  “I’m sorry about that napkin.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No. It isn’t. I’m going to call that guy Epstein in London and get you a signed photo.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  But something had jumped in his eyes.

  And eventually I did get him the photo, personally signed to him, and another to me for the A-1 office wall.

  Right now, though, more pressing matters were on my mind. Specifically, that swarthy face that blurred by in that Bonneville; but not so blurry that I didn’t recognize him.

  I was damn sure—well, pretty sure—that he was a Cuban who’d been arrested in November of last year by the Secret Service. I’d been working with them at the request of a friend of mine who was so famous that if I’d told my son, he would have accused me of bullshitting again.

  Three weeks prior to the shooting of the President in Dallas, a similar scheme had been hatched, and thwarted, in Chicago. I had hauled in two Cuban suspects and delivered them to the Secret Service, who had let them go after JFK’s motorcade through the Loop was canceled. I’d never seen either of the Cubans again.

  Until tonight, anyway, when one of them tried to run me down outside the Stock Yard Inn.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Late Summer 1962

  From Moisant International Airport to New Orleans stretched a dreary ten miles of billboards, filling stations, strip joints, cheap bars, parking lots, neon signs, and sleazy motels. Of the latter, the one at 1225 Airline Highway appeared perhaps the most benign, an innocuous-looking low-slung yellow-brick building with its aqua awnings and towering three-tiered ’50s-modern sign—

  Town and

  Country

  MOTEL

  —particularly if you were unaware it was owned and operated by Carlos Marcello, mob boss of Louisiana.

  The motel’s restaurant/lounge was horizontal to the highway. Behind it were two facing wings of guest rooms separated by an outdoor swimming pool edged at its far end by tall skinny pine trees. The trees helped conceal the bunker-like brick-and-cinder-block one-story building behind the motel.

  That modest structure housed Marcello’s office, out of which he ran such legitimate interests as a beer and liquor distributorship, shrimp-boat fleets, taxi and bus firms, and the tomato canning company that allowed him to claim he was principally “a tomato salesman.” Some in law enforcement might point to a panoply of rackets including (but not limited to) narcotics, prostitution, extortion, and gambling ranging from casinos to the Town and Country’s own B-girl-serviced lounge with its side room of slots.

  We had just come from the airport, my client Paul Fudala and I. We weren’t here to check in, although any time Carlos Marcello was your host, checking out was a possibility. A longtime veteran of the oil business, Paul was a client out of the A-1’s newest branch, Las Vegas; he had hired me to have my people investigate a couple of potential investors in a new business venture, an oil additive he’d developed. Carlos Marcello was one of those prospective moneymen, but I hadn’t been hired to investigate him. You didn’t have to work very hard to know what Marcello’s background was.

  Paul had grown up in New Orleans and had been a childhood friend of Marcello’s. For some reason, Paul had let slip to his old pal that I was doing his investigative work, and “Uncle Carlos” had enthusiastically said he wanted to meet me, “de famous private eye to da stars.” The mob boss, as I am attempting to convey, had a mush-mouth drawl that mingled, or rather mangled, Louisiana and Sicily into a unique mess.

  Paul was in his late fifties, a big white-haired cheerful guy with a nice tan and a Brooks Brothers suit not designed for this sticky, muggy heat. I was in a gray lightweight Botany 500, but it wasn’t faring much better against the humidity.

  Thankfully, the interior of the unadorned brick building behind the motel was air-conditioned. If anything, it was meat-locker cold. Just inside the building were two facing offices. On our right a closed door was labeled PHILLIP SMITH—a lawyer on staff, Paul said—while on our left an unlabeled door stood open, revealing a nice-looking middle-aged brunette in a short-sleeve pale yellow silk blouse with a jeweled brooch. Eyes friendly behind jeweled cat’s-eye glasses, she greeted Paul warmly by name.

  “Frances,” Paul said, smiling at her and taking the hot-pink-nailed hand she offered across a desk piled with paperwork, “it’s been too long. We’re half an hour early—should we go back and kill time in the Lounge, or is the Little Man in?”

  The Little Man was Louisiana’s big man, of course.

  She slapped at the air. Her drawl was an easily understandable second soprano. “Oh, you boys just go on down and see Mr. Marcello. He said send you all in whenever you got here.”

  I followed Paul down the hallway of unadorned cream-colored brick.

  “She was pleasant,” I said.

  “She’s married to Carlos’s top man—guy who runs the Town and Country. Nofio Pecora? You’d never guess butter-wouldn’t-melt Frances runs a call-girl ring spanning four states. Texas, Mississippi, Alabama.”

  “You said four states.”

  “Well, Louisiana, too, naturally.”

  Naturally.

  At the end of the hall, the office labeled CARLOS MARCELLO stood open, revealing the Little Man himself, hunkered behind a big uncluttered mahogany desk in a spacious, dark-paneled, handsomely appointed, plushly carpeted office that might have belonged to a bank president. The walls were all but covered with huge framed aerial photographs of a sampling of what Paul later informed me were Marcello’s Louisiana properties.

  Busy on the phone, our host smiled at us both, nodding, waving us into two tufted leather chairs opposite him while he continued his business.

  He was a squat, bullnecked, broad-shouldered man. His crisp-looking short-sleeve white shirt with silver-gray silk necktie revealed muscular if short arms. His head was a broad, oversize oval, dark hair graying and receding, eyes dark and wide-set, nose beaky, mouth oddly sensual, cleft chin resting on a fleshy second chin. To me he looked like the oldest, meanest elf on St. Nick’s staff, the guy who kept the other little fuckers in line.

  “No … no … yeah.… What? Dat dog don’t fuckin’ hunt.… Yeah, dat’s right, dat’s right.… No! You tell dat muthafucka he kin go fuck hisself! And ah don’t mean dat in no fun way.…”

  This went on for a while. Glancing around, I noticed an area over a brown-leather couch where the aerial photographs gave way to family photos and a few celebrity ones. Marcello with his arm around Sinatra, for example, taken maybe around 1950 when the mob was underwriting Frankie’s comeback. One photo had been taken at an outdoor rally and showed a teenaged Marcello grinning and shaking hands with the Kingfish himself, Governor Huey Long.

  I’d done a job for the Kingfish, back in ’35, and helped out his widow in ’37; but since then I had rarely returned to the Pelican State. Maybe that was because, once upon a time in Louisiana, I’d almost become a generous serving of Yankee Gumbo. Oh, you’d like the recipe? Well, you jes’ take one tub o’ lye and add y’seff one Yankee. Stir. Then pour the ol’ tub in the nearest swamp.

  When I’d been facing getting served up that way, a young, illiterate, bullnecked hood had been one of the flunkies I’d encountered. That teenaged hoodlum was just a hired hand, and we hadn’t really tangled. He had just helped set me down in a wooden chair in the back room of a ramshackle bayou restaurant called the Willswood Tavern and gone back out front to serve his customers, leaving me to the whims of a political stooge named McCracken and an imbecile called Bucky Boy. I wasn’t even sure the
hood knew my name, back then. I knew his, all right.

  I’d first encountered Marcello on that job for Huey, in ’35, in the French Quarter, when Carlos was just a kid loading Chief slot machines in back of a truck. I’d have never guessed that by 1947, at age thirty-eight, he would assume leadership of the Louisiana Mafia. Like Kennedy patriarch Joe, Carlos had gone partners with New York’s Frank Costello—Kennedy in booze, Marcello in gambling.

  Anti–organized crime crusader Robert Kennedy having been the kid of a fellow Costello accomplice was an irony Carlos never forgot—although I’d be shocked if he knew what the word irony meant.

  Not that he was a dummy. Far from it. Carlos Marcello was perhaps the most autonomous mob boss in these United States. The Mafia had, after all, put down its roots in Louisiana long before Chicago, New York, and New England. The loose structure here, so intertwined with Pelican politics, provided mob boss Marcello uncommon independence and power. He did not answer to the national commission of Cosa Nostra bosses, who considered Louisiana a foreign country, and rightly so.

  Marcello had learned early on to insulate himself from accomplices, or if not, silence them. For a junior-high-school dropout, he was uncommonly shrewd, and generous—his six brothers all held responsible positions in his enterprises. As one would expect of a Louisiana kingfish, he also had a knack for exploiting greedy, cowardly public officials.

  “Dat’s all ah got to say about dat,” Marcello said into the phone, keeping the elves in line. “Tony, don’t you call me back with no bad news now, you hear?… Give my love to Lucy and da twins.”

  And he hung up. He rose to shake hands with us. He was barely five feet tall, yet he still managed to give an impression of size.

  “Well, fuck me sideways,” Marcello said, “how long it been, Paulo?”

  “Maybe two years,” Paul said, finishing up a handshake. “I don’t get home much as I should.… Carlos, this is Nate Heller.”

  Marcello grinned at me. There was something charming about it. Also something chilling. He had dark, inverted-V eyebrows that gave his otherwise pleasant face a devil’s-mask quality.