The Million-Dollar Wound (Nathan Heller)

by Max Allan Collins

  He got up and got himself a Dixie cup of water from the cooler over by the bathroom. “The cops in these industrial districts never had a prostitution problem the like of this before; it’s an epidemic. We’re helping ’em out.”

  “You and the FBI.”

  “Yeah.” Sitting back down, sipping his water.

  “So if they ask you to help them out, by talking to a contrary cuss name of Heller, you say, why sure.”

  “Do you resent that, Nate?”

  I shook my head. “I could never resent you, Eliot. Not much, anyway. But it’s been ten years now that you’ve been trying to turn me into a good citizen. Won’t you ever give up?”

  “What are you talking about? I’ve heard you tell the truth on the witness stand before. With my own ears. Saw it with my own eyes.”

  “Who else’s were you planning on using?”

  “Well, you did do it. You told the truth.”

  “Once. That doesn’t make me a saint.”

  “Nate, you’re not on Nitti’s side. You never were.”

  “That’s right. I’m on my own side.”

  “Which is whichever side is safest, you mean.”

  “Or the most profitable.”

  He crumpled the paper cup in a fist and gestured with it. “The Outfit is strangling every union in this town. Can you honestly think about your father, and what he gave to unionism, and sit back and let that happen?”

  I pointed at him, gently. “Eliot, you’re my friend, but when you bring up my old man, you’re pushing it. And when you suggest that I could in any way single-handedly clean up union corruption that goes back years, decades, you’re screwier than the guys I was bunking with back at the bughouse.”

  He tossed the crumpled cup at the wastebasket by my desk; it went in. “The investigation is centering on the IA movie extortion racket, you know.”

  “So?”

  “So you were involved in Pegler’s initial investigation of the racket.”

  “Something you dragged me into, by the way, giving my name to your federal pals. I never thanked you for that, did I?”

  “I guess you didn’t.”

  “That’s because at the time I felt like kicking you in the slats.”

  He ignored that, pressed on: “You know plenty about that racket, Nate. You had contact with most of the principals.”

  “I don’t know anything firsthand. All I did was talk to some people.”

  “One of whom was Frank Nitti.”

  Shit.

  I said, “Nobody knows that for sure.”

  “Federal agents have a record of you going to see him several times, over a seven-year period, including in November 1939. At the Bismarck Hotel?”

  “Christ.”

  “The Grand Jury is going to want to know what was said in those meetings. Going way back, Nate. Back to Cermak.”

  I sat up and gave my friend as nasty a grin as I’d ever given him. “What about back to Dillinger? How would the FBI like to have what I know about the Dillinger hit go public? How at best the feds aided and abetted crooked Indiana cops in a police execution, and at worst shot the wrong man? If what I knew came out, Hoover would shit his fucking pants.”

  He shrugged elaborately. “That would be fine with me. Hoover’s overrated anyway. All I care about is the truth.”

  “Oh, Eliot, please. You’re not naive. Don’t pretend to be.”

  “Your testimony could be very valuable. You are the only non-mob-tainted party known to have had frequent private meetings with Nitti. Your testimony would have credence well beyond that of Bioff and Browne and Dean.”

  “So the Three Stooges are talking, huh?”

  He nodded. “They didn’t talk at their first trial, but when those stiff sentences came down, and they found out how much different prison life was than the El Mocambo, they started fishing for a deal.”

  “It was the Trocadero where they hung out in Hollywood, Eliot, but never mind. I still don’t want to play.”

  There was a knock at the door and I said, “It’s open.”

  Bill Drury came in.

  He wasn’t a big man, really—perhaps five-nine, a hundred and sixty pounds—but he was broad-shouldered and he had great energy, and a physical presence that could overwhelm you. He hung his camel-hair topcoat next to Eliot’s, and his fedora, too, revealing his typically dapper attire, a black-vested suit with gray pinstripes and a colorful blue-and-red-patterned tie and a fifty-cent shine. Bill was the best-dressed honest cop I ever met.

  And one of the friendliest, unless you were part of the Outfit. He strode over to us with his ready smile, shaking my hand first, then Eliot’s. His dark thinning hair was combed across his scalp to give an impression of more but the effect was less. His dark, alert eyes crowded a jutting nose under which a firm jaw rested on the beginnings of a double chin.

  “Heller,” he said, cheerfully, sitting down next to Eliot, “you truly look like death warmed over.”

  “An honest man at last,” I said. “You look fat and sassy.”

  “When your wife works,” he said with an expansive gesture of one hand, “why not?”

  I had no argument with that.

  “I presume Eliot has filled you in,” he said.

  “Somewhat.”

  “We were asked, because we’re old friends of yours, to pave the way for the federal prosecutor. They’d like you to be a witness.”

  “Then I presume they’ll subpoena me.”

  “They’d like you to be a friendly witness.”

  “You know me, Lieutenant. Friendly as the day is long.”

  “And the days are getting shorter, I know, I know. And it’s ‘Captain,’ now.”

  “Really? How the world does change when you go off on a pleasure cruise.”

  Eliot turned to Bill and said, “I get the feeling Nate feels we’re imposing upon his friendship.”

  “If we are,’’ Bill said to me, flatly sincere, “I apologize. I think you know what sort of stranglehold the Outfit’s had on the unions, here, and we’re finally getting a chance to break it. Your inside knowledge could play a major role in that.”

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  “The IA’s extortion racket is going to blow the lid off. We’re talking about ending gangster control of not just the IA, but the laborer’s council, which includes twenty-five local unions, twenty-thousand members, street cleaners, tunnel workers, streetcar company employees, you name it. Then, beyond the laborer’s council, there’s the sanitary engineers union, the hotel employees, the bartenders, the truckers, the laundry workers, the retail clerks—”

  “I get the point, Bill.”

  “Then cooperate with the grand jury.”

  “Let me ask you something. Both of you. You keep talking about the IA’s movie ‘extortion’ racket. What extortion is that? As I recall, it was collusion between the movie moguls and the mob. Since when is strike prevention insurance ‘extortion’?”

  Drury finally bristled. “I don’t know what else you’d call it.”

  I put my feet up on the desk and leaned back in my swivel chair. “I tell you what. I’ll come testify. I’ll come spill my guts about every secret meeting I ever had with Nitti. I’ll tell you and the grand jury things that’ll make the hair on your head curlier than the hair in your shorts. I’ll tell God and everybody things that’ll guarantee me ending up in an alley with a bullet in my brain. But first you got to assure me of one thing. You got to assure me that those movie moguls are going to be indicted right alongside Nitti and company.”

  Eliot had given up; he was staring out the window. Drury sat up in the chair, straight as his principles. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said. “I only know this is our chance to put Nitti and Campagna and Ricca and that whole sorry crowd away.”

  “And then the next crowd’ll step in, and will they be any better? What are we talking—Accardo? Giancana? That’ll be swell. Nitti, at least, has kept the bloodshed to a minimum.”

&
nbsp; Drury shook his head. “How in God’s name can you find anything good to say about that evil son of a bitch?”

  “Nitti’s no worse than the next guy in his slot, and possibly a damn sight better. I remember the Capone days, and so do you, Bill.”

  “Nate, I’m disappointed in you.”

  “I told you I’d testify. I’ll sing like Nelson Eddy sitting on hot coals. But I want to see Louie B. Mayer and Jack Warner and Joe Schenck sitting in cells next to Nitti and Campagna and Ricca.”

  “Schenck did time.”

  “On income tax, and not much.”

  Eliot looked at me, glumly. “They can subpoena you anyway, Nate. You know that.”

  “Haven’t you heard? I’m battle-fatigued. I’m shell-shocked. I got amnesia, remember? Just ask the medics.”

  Eliot shook his head, looked at the floor.

  Bill sat there, dumbfounded. “I don’t get you, Heller.”

  “Bill, those Hollywood schmucks Bioff and Browne and Dean plucked were just trying to get off cheap where paying the help was concerned. And the rank and file knew they had gangsters in their union but figured all that muscle was getting ’em some extra bucks, and looked the other way accordingly. So I say screw ’em. Screw ’em all.”

  Drury started to say something, but the phone rang. It was Gladys, next door; for Drury.

  “I left my number,” he said, taking the phone. “Hope you don’t mind.”

  I waved that off.

  Drury was mostly listening, so I said to Eliot, quietly, “No hard feelings?”

  He smiled wearily again. “None. I’m just glad you’re back from that hellhole in one piece. Why don’t I buy you dinner tonight?”

  “Why don’t you?”

  Drury barked, “Jesus Christ,” into the phone, and we looked at him. Then he said, “Right away,” and handed me the receiver, and stood.

  “Why don’t you come with me, Heller,” he said, his face ashen. “There’s something you might be interested in.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. A good example of your theory how Nitti and company soft-peddle the bloodshed.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Grab your coat and we’ll go over to Addison Street, in Lakeview. You might be interested in seeing what’s become of Estelle Carey.”

  She was naked under her red silk housecoat, but she wasn’t much to look at. Not in the way she had been, once.

  She lay on the plush carpet partially under a straight-back chair in the dining room of her third-floor five-room apartment at 512 West Addison in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of wall-to-wall apartment buildings near the lake on the North Side. She’d been living well. Dying had been something else again.

  Her hair—she’d dyed it red since I saw her last—was a fright wig, clumps of it torn away from or possibly cut off at the scalp, scattered on the floor nearby, like a barbershop. The face was recognizably hers, despite the cuts and bruises and welts that added touches of purple and red and black to her white face, and despite too the jagged slash through her left eye and the ice-pick punctures on her cheeks and her bloodied broken nose and her smashed pulpy lips. Her throat had been cut, ear to ear, but superficially, a mark of torture, not murder. She had lived through most of this.

  The red silk housecoat was scorched from the waist down, and so was she, till her legs were virtually charred. So were her hands and arms. Someone had set the housecoat afire—had splashed whiskey on it and set a match to it, it would seem—and she had put the fire out with her hands, or tried to. She’d been somewhat successful, because only the lower part of her was burned, and even the red silk housecoat could still be seen to be a red silk housecoat. But the fire had spread to the carpet, where it met the broken and apparently not empty whiskey bottle and got ambitious. The two nearby walls were black from floor to ceiling, dripping wet from the firemen’s hose, the lingering smoke smell still strong, acrid in the room. Not enough to wipe out the smell of death, however, the smell of scorched human flesh. Not enough to smother the memory of a certain foul wind, of dead, rotting flesh, Japs bloating in the sun in the kunai grass, charred grinning corpses by a wrecked tank along the Matanikau and then I was out in the hall, leaning against the wall, doubled over, trying not to puke, trying to keep that corned beef platter from Binyon’s down where it belonged.

  Drury was right there beside me, a hand on my shoulder, looking ashamed of himself. I’d been in there standing looking at Estelle Carey, frozen by the burned sight of her, for I don’t know how long, while he got filled in by the detectives already on the scene. Now he was embarrassed, saying, “Damnit, Heller. I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.”

  I was breathing too hard to speak.

  He said, “I was trying to make a point. This came up, and bringing you along seemed like the perfect way to make a point.”

  I said, “Don’t say ‘this came up’ to a guy who’s trying not to lose his lunch, okay, Bill?”

  “Nate. I’m sorry. Shit. I feel like a heel.”

  I let go of the wall; I seemed able to stand, without any help. “Well, you are a heel, Bill. But…who isn’t, from time to time?”

  “Why don’t you go, Nate. Go on home. If you’re interested in how this sad affair plays out, I’ll keep you posted.”

  I swallowed. Shook my head no. “I’ll stay.”

  “I was a bastard to use that dead girl like this. I hope my apology’s enough. After what you been through overseas, I shoulda had sense enough not to…”

  “Will you shut the fuck up? Let’s go back inside.”

  Drury, having been one of my partners back on the pickpocket detail, knew very well that Estelle and I had been an item, once. So it was cruel of him to expose me to this. But then he hadn’t seen the condition of the corpse yet, when he made the decision; if he had, I doubt he’d have called me in.

  He had an excuse though; I was the one who, officially, identified the body.

  My lunch was staying down, but I was shaking. We moved through the vestibule into the living room and back into the dining room; it was cold, the windows open to air out the smoky place, letting in the winter chill. Eliot hadn’t joined us—he had business at the Banker’s Building; Drury had driven me over in an unmarked car. The firemen—who had been the first to the scene, the neighbor across the hall calling in to report smoke seeping out under the front door—had been and gone. The fire had been contained to the one room, only two walls of which were scorched. Present now were two patrol officers, Drury and two detectives; this was Drury’s bailiwick, as he was currently working out of nearby Town Hall Station. More police and related personnel would descend soon. Photographers, medical examiner, dicks from downtown. This was a good chance to get a look around before the professionals stumbled over themselves ruining evidence.

  I walked into the next room, through a doorless archway, stepping around a shattered glass, which had apparently been hurled against one wall of the compact white modern kitchen. To my left was a small maple table with two maple chairs, one of them pulled away from the table, at an unnatural angle. Against the wall were cabinets and a sink and more cabinets; the cabinets to the far left were blood-smeared; there was blood spattered in the sink, too.

  “The most recent thing cooked up in here,” I said, “was Estelle’s murder. Look at this.”

  I pointed to the floor where a blood-stained bread knife, a blood-spattered rolling pin, a blood-tipped ice pick and a ten-inch blackjack lay, here and there, as if casually dropped when done. Nearby was a kitchen chair pulled away from a small table, on which was a flat iron, used to batter her, I figured, and a glass ashtray with a number of crushed butts therein; spatterings of blood were on the table, chair and floor underneath.

  “This is where it started,” Drury said, hands on hips, appraising the chair. Still in his camel-hair coat. He really was too well-dressed to be a cop. Honest cop.

  “Not quite,” I said. “Take a look.”

  I stood and pointed to
two cups on the kitchen counter. One of them was half-filled with hot cocoa; cold cocoa, now. In the bottom of the other cup was the dry cocoa powder, ready for hot milk to be poured in. The milk was still simmering on the stove, opposite.

  “This is where it started,” I said.

  “How do you figure?”

  “She was fixing a cup of cocoa for one of her guests, her back turned as she faced the counter. She was already drinking a cup herself. They grabbed her, tossed her in that chair, started beating her.”

  Drury pushed his hat back on his head; the dark eyes, set so close on either side of the formidable nose, narrowed. “That makes sense, I guess. But why do you assume more than one ‘guest’?”

  “It’s two people. Probably a man and a woman.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “The broken whiskey bottle out in the other room, a glass of which was poured in here and then hurled against that wall.” You could see the dried splash it had made.

  “So?”

  “So Estelle didn’t drink. I also don’t think it was her practice to keep a liquor cabinet for guests, though I could be wrong.”

  “You aren’t wrong,” Drury granted. He said his detectives had already determined that.

  “My guess,” I said, “is that bottle of whiskey was brought in, by one of her killers, in that paper bag there.”

  A wadded-up paper bag was tossed in the corner.

  Drury went to it, bent and picked it up, uncrumpled it, looked inside. “There’s a receipt in here. This is a neighborhood liquor store.”

  “In the detective business we call that a clue, Captain.”

  He only smiled at that; we’d been friends a long time. “Well, I’d tend to agree with you that the whiskey was probably brought in by a man. But just because Estelle was fixing a second cup of cocoa doesn’t mean the other party was necessarily a woman. Men have been known to drink cocoa, you know.”

  “It’s a man and a woman. The man used the heavy male weapon—the blackjack—and the woman used makeshift female weapons, flat iron, kitchen utensils like a rolling pin, ice pick, bread knife.”