Shrug. “Money’s money. And I don’t hate Willie. I don’t feel much about him one way or another.”
“I hear you arrested him once.”
Batter up.
“Uh, Frank, that was a long time ago. I haven’t been on the force since ’32, remember?”
He cracked his knuckles; it sounded like a firing squad warming up. “This guy Pegler,” he said, back to his deceptively casual tone, “this big-deal columnist that Bioff was havin’ you issue the warnings about. You had any contact with him?”
Straight was the only way to play it; pretty straight, anyway.
“Twice,” I said. “He came around early this week asking if I ever arrested Bioff. I said yes, but gave him no details. He came around to my office this afternoon, looking for more information; I didn’t give him any. In fact, I threw him out of my office. And I mean threw him out—bodily.”
He took another slow sip of milk. “Why?”
“He called me a hebe.”
“Why, are you a hebe?”
“My father was Jewish. Does Heller sound Irish to you?”
He liked that small bit of impertinence. He said, “If he called me a wop, I’d have him talked to.”
“I’ll bet.”
“I wouldn’t kill him. I’d like to have him hit, right now, for the trouble he’s drumming up for me, but he’s out of bounds.”
“Hitting a newsman like him would really stir up the heat.”
“Like Al used to say,” he added, with a private smile. He meant Capone. “I hear this Pegler’s found out that Bioff still has six months to serve.”
Nitti knowing that was no surprise: little went on in the police department that wasn’t known to the Outfit.
“He told me as much this afternoon,” I said, confirming it.
“You’ll be made a hero,” he said, still smiling, faintly.
“It’ll stick in Pegler’s craw,” I said. “Hebe that I am.”
Nitti laughed. “That is kinda sweet. He needs to build you up to help tear Willie down.”
“I’m not going along with it, Frank.”
He waved a hand at me. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault you busted that little pimp a hundred years ago. It also ain’t your fault that this old unserved sentence caught up with him. He shoulda served it, or bought his way out, or something—not just let it hang.”
“If I had it to do again,” I said, “I’d still bust the bastard. He was a mean pimp; he hurt his girls.”
“Sometimes I think you’re still a cop at heart, Heller.”
“Sometimes I think I am, too.”
“Then why do I trust you?”
“Because I’m afraid of you, Frank.”
He laughed; it was a booming laugh. I’d never heard him laugh that way before; and I never did again.
He said, “I like you, kid. You got chutzpah, you got integrity, you got brains. Why don’t you close down that little shop of yours and come to work for me?”
“I really am too much a cop, Frank. I respect you. You’re the best man in your world. But the Outfit does a lot of things that make me…uncomfortable.”
“Fair enough,” he said, and I couldn’t help thinking again that that was the name of that goddamn Pegler’s column, “but I got to ask you a favor.”
“Sure.”
All humor, all goodwill, left his face; like a sudden change in the weather, Nitti rained on me: “Stay out of the Outfit’s business. You turned up twice this week in my business. You almost got killed once because of it. I would’ve regretted that. I would’ve sent flowers. But dead is dead, my friend, and that is how you will be if you continue to put your nose in my affairs. Capeesh?”
“Capeesh,” I managed to say.
He leaned back; his face and his voice softened a bit. “You can’t be faulted for taking on a client who offers money. I understand that. I understand the temptation when an O’Hare, a Bioff, comes around and says I will give you money. But next time such a person comes to you, think, next time, remember: Frank Nitti offered you a job. I offered you a job years ago, in a hospital room as a matter of fact, not long after you saved my life from Cermak’s maggots and I don’t forget that, not a second do I forget that, but in truth you turned my offer down. And you turned me down just now, again. From that I take it to mean that you aren’t interested in my business. So stay the hell out of it. I mean this in a friendly way. Final warning.”
I swallowed. “I appreciate your frankness, Frank. I appreciate the warning.”
“Right. Some people wake up dead in the alley. They didn’t rate no warning. You, I figure, got that much coming.”
“I’m glad you feel that way, Frank. I apologize for—”
He waved a hand again. “No apologies. Clients hired you; that’s what you’re in business for. But that was before the law was laid down. Henceforth, stay the fuck out of my affairs.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say, except: “Yes, Frank.”
“Now, you saw some things at O’Hare’s.”
What was he talking about?
“Frank, I don’t know…”
“I want you to forget it. All of it. Anything O’Hare said to you, before he was killed. Anything you saw there, at his office. You just put that out of your mind.”
And as he said that, I put it together: the very thing he didn’t want anyone to put together. Because as he sat there looking at ledgers—fresh from a conference with O’Hare’s partner Johnny Patton—I recalled who was the accountant at Sportsman’s Park: Les Shumway, the witness who helped put Capone away. And who was O’Hare, but the federal informer who helped put Capone away? Yet O’Hare had prospered, in the wake of Capone’s fall, and even Shumway had found refuge, right under Frank Nitti’s nose. Why wasn’t Shumway dead?
Perhaps he was, now, like his boss O’Hare. Or he was out of town, or he was being well taken care of.
Because the man sitting across from me was the real man who put Capone away. It wasn’t Stege or Ness or Irey or Frank J. Wilson or Uncle Sam.
It was Frank Nitti.
I knew, with a certainty that chilled me, something that the papers for all their theorizing had not guessed, something that the feds for all their investigating had not even considered, something that few people living knew, few people but for the handful of conspirators themselves, one of whom, Edward J. O’Hare, was freshly dead.
That Frank Nitti had, through O’Hare and Shumway, set Capone up for the federal fall.
To vacate the throne for himself.
“Well,” he said, “I won’t take up any more of your time. It’s been a busy week for all concerned.”
“I would imagine,” I said, casually I hoped, “what with the big boss coming back in a few days.”
He laughed again; not the booming laugh, but loud enough. “Al’s not getting back in the business, kid.”
“Would I be out of line asking why?”
Matter-of-fact shrug. “We heard rumors, but till they let his own doctor examine him at Lewisburg the other day, we couldn’t be sure.”
“Sure of what?”
His smile stopped just short of gloating. “Kid, Al’s crazier than a bedbug. The syph’s eaten away half his brain. He just didn’t live right, you know.”
And he finished his milk.
I rose. My knees felt weak, but I could stand. I could even walk, and did, out the door.
Campagna, waiting, said, “You want a ride home? Snow’s comin’ down. I got a car.”
I could hear the muffled sound of Nitti talking to a woman, in the entryway back of the closed door behind me.
“No thanks,” I said.
After all, the day might come soon enough when Louis Campagna, or someone like him, took me for a ride at Nitti’s behest.
On November 22, the first of Pegler’s columns exposing Bioff and Browne appeared in hundreds of papers nationwide. For once, Pegler submerged his quirky, alternately folksy and pompous writing style into a flat, cl
ear, straightforward reporter’s voice that helped make his union-busting series something that was taken seriously.
The first column specifically exposed Bioff’s unserved sentence for pandering; later Pegler bared Browne’s gangster-tinged past.
In February 1940, due to public pressure created by Pegler’s columns, Bioff was returned to Chicago and, on April 8 of that year, the clang of a cell door swinging shut at the House of Correction marked the start of his actually serving that long-forgotten six-month sentence. Word was he had a private office-like cell with a fresh tub of iced beer each day, the latter a luxury more suited to Browne than Bioff; and he was sometimes released on a good-conduct pass, and was seen out-and-about in Chicago. What the hell—I was pleased that the bust I’d made so long ago had finally resulted in a jail sentence being served at all, iced beer, private office, good-conduct passes or no.
On May 4, 1941, Pegler was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, for “articles on scandals in the ranks of organized labor.”
Twenty days later, Bioff and his co-defendant Browne were charged in a federal court in New York under the Federal Anti-Racketeering Statute on the film-industry extortion. Shortly thereafter, so was Nick (Dean) Circella. Dean and Browne each received eight years; Bioff ten. All three went to prison without uttering a word about Nitti and the Outfit.
Dean, however, was a fugitive for some months prior to his trial, until FBI agents arrested him in a roadhouse known as Shorty’s Place, in Cicero. He was hiding out with Estelle Carey, who had dyed her hair black and posed with Dean (himself posing as a workman) as his little homebody housewife; it must have been a masquerade Estelle enjoyed not in the least.
The murder of E. J. O’Hare remained (and remains) unsolved.
Me? I went about my business, watching all this from the sidelines, keeping what I knew about the Nitti-directed murder of O’Hare to myself. That week never quite faded from my memory, however, if for no other reason than it was the single most financially rewarding week I had in those early years, and for some time thereafter. Between O’Hare, Nitti, Montgomery and Bioff, I brought in enough mazuma to pay the entire yearly salary of my secretary with some left over toward one of my ops. At the same time I knew the risks I’d taken earning that dough could never be properly compensated. I could still be killed for what I’d done, and for what I knew.
Nonetheless, I thought all this movie-union crap was behind me. I had not been called to testify in the Bioff/Browne/Dean proceedings, and Pegler had in his columns played down my role as much as he could; he probably thought he was getting back at me, but I considered it a favor. I took Nitti’s advice and stayed out of his Outfit’s business—as much as I could, anyway, in a town he owned.
When I came back to Chicago in February 1943, Guadalcanal weighed more heavily on my mind than Willie Bioff and company, and I had no intention of allowing myself to get drawn back into that sordid affair. Nitti’s “final warning,” after all, to stay out of his business, still went—and, battle fatigue and amnesia not withstanding, I clearly remembered that Frank Nitti was not to be taken lightly.
And then Estelle Carey came back into my life, and everything went out the window.
I got a cab at Union Station just before noon, sharing it with two sailors, and sat in the rear holding on to the strap and looking out the window at snowy, grimy streets. I was back in Chicago, all right. It had been less than a year, but the world had changed. Service flags were in every storefront window—one star for each son at war, and most flags bore at least two stars; horse-drawn wagons (“This wagon replaces a truck for the duration!”) mingled with autos, while cabbies caught behind the wagons turned shades of patriotic red, blue and white, swallowing their irritation. The autos all had ration stickers prominently displayed in their windshields, B stickers in evidence mostly, and an occasional C, like my cabbie’s. The sidewalks seemed filled with lovely young women, the edges of their skirts under their winter coats flapping, the city’s famous wind intent on exposing pretty, nylonless legs; but if you had a nickel for every guy under forty you saw on the street, you wouldn’t have busfare—unless you counted the boys in uniform.
Me, I wasn’t in uniform, unlike the gobs I was sharing the cab with, and I wasn’t a boy, either. I was a gray old man in a gray woolen overcoat I’d picked up in D.C. yesterday—under which I was wearing the suit I’d worn to San Diego last year, and it seemed a little big for me, like it belonged to somebody else. Maybe somebody I used to be. I sat there craving a cigarette, but for reasons I couldn’t explain, not giving into it.
The cabbie dropped me in front of the Dill Pickle, the rumble of the El greeting me, making me feel at least a little at home. Up in the window of the A-1 Detective Agency a service flag bore a single star. I wondered if it stood for me, or Frankie Fortunato, who was in the Army. Probably Frankie.
Sea bag slung over my shoulder, I stepped around a wino (4-F or over forty? Hard to say) and started up the familiar narrow stairs; passed some people there, older men, younger women, coming down for lunch, nobody I recognized. I set foot on the fourth floor, feeling like my own ghost. Walked down the familiar hall with its wood and pebbled glass and paused at the door that still had NATHAN HELLER, PRESIDENT, on it. I touched the letters; they didn’t smear.
I turned the knob.
Gladys was sitting behind her desk, on which was a rose in a slender vase. She looked lovely, her brown hair in a slightly longer pageboy, now, her white blouse slightly more feminine and ruffly than I remembered ever seeing her in. She was a little heavier, but it looked good on her—made her bustier. She gave me a big smile.
“Hello, Mr. Heller,” she said.
She stood and came around and hugged me. I hugged her back. It felt good, if a little awkward.
A banner made from a bedsheet said WELCOME HOME, BOSS in crude yet oddly graceful red letters; it was tacked on the wall over that World’s Fair couch where I’d caught Gladys and Frankie humping, years ago.
“You shouldn’t’ve made a fuss,” I said.
“Not that big a fuss,” she said, shrugging.
“No ticker-tape parade?”
She narrowed her eyes; she didn’t get it. Gladys still didn’t have a sense of humor. “This is the extent of it,” she said, gesturing to the banner, which I felt sure she’d made herself. “Except for we have some champagne chilling.”
“That’s fuss enough,” I said. “Lead me to it.”
“You got it,” somebody said.
I turned and saw Lou Sapperstein, looking haggard and wearing a black arm band on one sleeve of his brown suitcoat, standing in the doorway of my inner office, pouring me a Dixie cup of champagne out of a big bottle.
I went over and took the cup with my left hand and shook hands with Lou with my right and drank the champagne and said, “How’s business?”
He was a touch thinner; more lines in his face. He’d switched from wire-rim glasses to tortoise shell, bifocals now; gray tinged the dark hair around his ears. His skull hadn’t lost its shine.
“Business is not bad,” he said. “Let’s have lunch at Binyon’s and I’ll fill you in.”
“Fine. Why the, uh…?”
He lifted the arm with the armband, gently. “My little brother. Fighter pilot. Silliest goddamn thing. Died in the States while still in training.”
“I’m sorry, Lou.”
“I am, too. Hell of a thing.” He looked at Gladys. “Care to join us? We can make it a celebration.”
Gladys was already back behind her desk. “No. Somebody has to hold down the fort.”
Gladys had loosened up, considerably, over the years; but she was still business first.
“Where shall I put this?” I said, referring to the sea bag, currently residing on the couch.
“Why don’t you stick it in the office next door?” Lou said.
“For now,” I said. “But I got to find a place to stay. I should’ve made arrangements while I was still at St. E’s, but it was hard t
o think that far ahead…”
Gladys said, “They called us, Mr. Heller.”
“For Christ’s sakes, will you call me Nate.”
“Nate,” she said. It was hard for her. “Anyway, one of your doctors called several weeks ago, and we’ve been looking for a room ever since. I’m afraid there’s nothing at the Morrison.”
“Quite a housing shortage,” Lou said, with a fatalistic shrug.
“So we took the liberty of rearranging the office next door,” she said.
“With both you and Frankie gone,” Lou said, “we haven’t been using that office at all. I’ve been working out of your office, of course…” He nodded to my inner office, his expression apologetic.
“That’s as it should be,” I said.
“So we had the partitions taken out next door,” he went on, “and put your desk in there, as well as some of the personal items you’d put in storage. Some furniture from your old suite at the Morrison. You remember that old Murphy bed of yours that’s been stored in the basement, for years?”
I sat down on the couch, put a hand on the sea bag. “Don’t tell me.”
“We had it hauled back upstairs. It’s in there. You can have that whole office to yourself, and live in it, too, temporarily, till you find something else.”
“Full circle,” I said.
“What?” Gladys said.
“Nothing,” I said.
Lou said to her, “He lived in his office when he started out. That office.”
“Oh,” Gladys said, not getting it. Irony wasn’t her strong suit.
I stood. “I appreciate you going to that trouble.”
“If you like,” Lou said, gesturing with two open hands, “I’ll use that office, and you can use the one in here, and just sleep in there. I just figured, with clients used to dealing with me, it wouldn’t hurt to have a transition period, where…”
“Don’t say another word. You stay put, Lou. It’s going to take me a while to get into the swing of things again. For the next few weeks, at least, consider yourself the boss.”
The Million-Dollar Wound (Nathan Heller) Page 21