The Million-Dollar Wound (Nathan Heller)

by Max Allan Collins

  “Really? Tell me, Bill, the day you graduated—how many bullet holes did you have in your mortar board?”

  His mouth distorted as he thought that over. “Maybe he wasn’t shooting at the boys on the train. They just heard shots and thought he was.”

  “Who or what was he shooting at, then?”

  “His own head, of course!”

  “And he missed? And his hat didn’t fly off when these misaimed bullets flew through?”

  Drury shrugged. “There are always anomalies in a case like this.”

  “Anomalies my ass! Is that how you explain evidence that doesn’t suit you? Dismissing it?”

  “Heller, you’re just a civilian observer here. Here at my discretion. Don’t cause any trouble.”

  “What do you think happened here, Captain Drury?”

  He put his hands on the hips of his expensive black topcoat and smirked. “Gee, I’m trying to work up a suitable theory that makes sense with what little we got—namely, three eyewitnesses who saw a guy shoot himself in the head, and a guy with a gun in his hand and a hole in his head. I’m just leaning the slightest little bit in the direction of suicide. What do you make of it, Heller?”

  I motioned around us. “Look at these clumps of bushes; the high grass, weeds. He was running, staggering. Drunk? Sure, from the smell of him he’d been drinking. Granted. But mightn’t he been running from somebody?”

  “Who?”

  “People trying to kill him, Bill. Maybe he was out walking and somebody took a shot at him from those bushes, and he started running away. He was known to take regular walks, you know.”

  “No I don’t,” he said. He eyed me suspiciously. “How do you?”

  “Never mind. He did take walks. Maybe he walked a regular route—this route. We’re only a few blocks from his house—he was headed home. Somebody took a shot at him, possibly using a silenced gun, and when he returned fire, those caboose crawlers thought he was shooting at them.”

  Drury smiled humorlessly and shook his head. “And then an assassin in the bushes shot him in the head just as the railroad boys were approaching, I suppose?”

  I looked up at the sky; let it spit on me. “No, Bill. Nitti shot himself. I don’t question that.”

  “What do you question, then?”

  “The circumstances. I think he fell, fleeing would-be assassins—knocked himself out. Maybe he was blind drunk and fell, what’s the difference? Anyway, when he opened his eyes he saw the hazy image of three men walking toward him—sixty, seventy feet away—and rather than give Ricca the pleasure, he raised his gun to his head in one last act of defiance and ended it all.”

  “Ricca?”

  I shrugged. “There’s a rift between Ricca and Nitti—and the Outfit’s sided with Ricca.”

  “Who says?”

  “Everybody knows that. Get out of your office once in a while. Let’s say Ricca put a contract out on Nitti. His torpedoes tried to kill Frank, today, along these tracks, and when the switchman and flagman and their conductor jumped off the train, the torpedoes headed for the hills. Unseen. Only Nitti didn’t know they’d gone. And he mistook the IC men approaching him for his assassins.”

  Drury thought about that. “That’s where the bullet holes in his hat came from? They shot at him and missed, these torpedoes of yours and Ricca’s?”

  “Yeah. Or Nitti hit the high weeds himself, when the first shot rang out. And then stuck his hat up on a stick or on his finger, to draw their fire. Maybe.” I shrugged again. “Who knows?”

  “Anomalies, Heller,” he said. “These things never sort out exactly right.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “I think he shot himself in the head.”

  “Cornered by Ricca’s gunmen, he did.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  I couldn’t answer that. I walked away from him, my hands in my topcoat pockets. Why did it matter to me? Why did I want to believe Frank Nitti’s final act was one of defiance, not despair?

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. Drury.

  He said, “When we get some more cops out here, some more real cops, I’ll have these ditches combed. If we find any more spent shells, I’ll give your theory some thought. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You liked the man, didn’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t say I liked him.”

  “Respected him, then.”

  “Let’s just say I knew him.”

  We walked back toward the suburban cops and Nitti’s body. Chief Rose approached us. He said, “I never heard of one of these big gangsters killing himself before. Isn’t this a little unusual?’

  “Frankly,” Drury said, “I’m not surprised. Nitti’s been in ill health. He probably figured he was due for prison, and that he couldn’t get the express medical care he desired there—so he took the easy way out.”

  That was the way Bill wanted it to be. He hated the gangsters, and he loved the idea of making a coward out of Nitti. Bill was a fine cop, a good man, a better friend; but I knew my reading of how Nitti had died would be lost in the shuffle. Maybe it was wrong of me to look at the facts and investigate wanting to prove Nitti died defiantly; but it was just as wrong for Drury to do the same wanting to prove Nitti a coward. Bill was in charge, though; and the way he saw it would be the way it went down.

  Then, suddenly, in a black coat and a black dress, already in mourning, automatically in mourning, there she was: Antoinette Cavaretta. The current Mrs. Frank Nitti. The widow Nitti. The steel woman. On the arm of a uniformed cop who’d gone to get her, at Chief Rose’s request, as it turned out.

  She walked falteringly to the fence where Nitti lay; she knelt by him and held his hand and made a sign of the cross.

  She stood.

  “This was my husband,” she said.

  Her usually dark face seemed pale; she wore very little makeup. The uniformed man escorted her a ways away from the body.

  Drury went to her; I followed.

  “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Nitti,” Drury said.

  “Don’t be a hypocrite, Captain Drury,” she said. “We both know you hated my husband.”

  I said, “Where were you when this happened?”

  She looked at me sharply. “Praying for my husband.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “Frank left about one o’clock and said he was going downtown to see his lawyer. I was worried. He’s been sick, and then this grand jury trouble came up. So I went to church, to Our Lady of Sorrows, and made a novena for him.”

  Drury shot me a look as if to say this news proved that Nitti had set out today to commit suicide.

  She said, “You people have always persecuted him. Poor Frank! He never did a wrong thing in his life.”

  Drury said nothing.

  “Do I need your permission,” she asked, bitterly, “to make the funeral arrangements? To have my husband removed to a mortuary?”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Drury said. “Due to the circumstances of his death, it’s the county morgue for him.”

  She gave him a look to kill. “You’re so superior, Captain. Don’t take such a death so lightly. You and my husband played in the same arena; such an end could well be yours one day.”

  “Is that a threat, Mrs. Nitti?”

  “No, Mr. Drury. It’s the voice of experience. Now, I’d like to go home. I have a little boy who’ll be coming home from St. Mary’s in half an hour. There’s difficult news I must share with him.”

  “Certainly you can go,” he said, not unkindly.

  “Why don’t I walk her?” I asked him.

  “It’s not necessary,” she said.

  “I’d like to,” I said.

  Drury didn’t care.

  Mrs. Nitti said, “I would appreciate an arm to lean on, Mr. Heller, yes.”

  I gave her my arm and we walked back up along the tracks toward Cermak Road; it was the opposite direction from her house, but the closest street that crossed the tracks.<
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  “My husband was fond of you,” she said.

  “Sometimes he had funny ways of showing it.”

  We walked.

  “That was Frank,” she said, as if that explained everything.

  “Mrs. Nitti—or should I call you Toni?”

  She took her arm from mine. Stopped for a moment. “Mrs. Nitti will be just fine. Do I sense a touch of disrespect in your voice?”

  “I must say you’re taking your husband’s death well, Mrs. Nitti. You’re a rock, aren’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, that the first time I saw you, you were in the presence of a dead man. Oh, he didn’t know he was dead, or at least he didn’t like to think he was. But with your help, his faithful secretary’s help, E. J. O’Hare got dead. Good and dead.”

  She looked at me coldly, impassively; but she was pulling breath in like a race horse.

  “A few years go by, and then you turn up again. At Frank Nitti’s front door. His loving wife. The wife of a dead man. That was the difference between Frank and O’Hare—your husband knew he was dead. When I spoke to him last night, I could tell he knew he was very near the end. He was a brave man, I think.”

  “Yes he was,” she said.

  “I wonder,” I said, “if you were keeping tabs on Frank for Ricca, like you kept tabs on O’Hare for Frank.”

  “You’re a fool.”

  “Am I? How’s this for foolish? Frank Nitti, unknown to all but a handful—said handful including you and E. J. O’Hare—betrayed Al Capone to the feds.”

  Her eyes flickered.

  “It’s so obvious,” I said, “but no one ever thought of it…even though key Capone witness Les Shumway was still employed at Sportsman’s Park. Of course, Nitti arranged Capone’s downfall. Of course, Nitti moved the chess pieces until he was king himself. In a way, I admire him for it.”

  “So,” she said, “do I.”

  “But then his wife Anna dies. She was the love of his life. She, and his son, were everything to him. And he begins to slide. He goes into the hospital, for the old back trouble from the wounds Mayor Cermak’s boys caused. And for the ulcers that developed after he was wounded.”

  “His heart was also bad,” she said. “And he was convinced he had stomach cancer. I wouldn’t want you to leave anything out, Mr. Heller.”

  “Stomach cancer. Perfect. I bet YOU don’t even know why he had that notion.”

  “Certainly I do, she said. “The assassin who killed Cermak believed he had stomach cancer.”

  “That’s right. Joe Zangara. The one-man Sicilian suicide squad who pretended to shoot at FDR so that your husband could bring Mayor Cermak down without… I can almost hear Frank saying it…‘stirring up the heat.’”

  “My husband was a brilliant man.”

  “Once,” I said “He was—once. He began to slip, though, didn’t he? Despondent over his wife’s death, he took long solitary walks. He even began to drink a little—not like him, not at all like him. His memory began to falter. That’s where you come in.”

  “Really? In what way?”

  “A marriage of convenience. A business arrangement You ran a dogtrack in Miami, you helped run Sportsman’s Park. You’d been Frank’s inside ‘man’ with O’Hare. Frank had a son he loved very much, who needed a mother—a strong person who could look after little Joseph’s interests after he was gone. A mob insider like you, that was perfect. And, maybe, it was a way to keep you from ever spilling what you knew about Frank setting up Capone. Hell, maybe you blackmailed him into marrying you.”

  She let out a long breath, and began to walk again. Quickly. I walked right alongside her.

  “You know what I think, Mrs. Nitti?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you’ve had practice being a widow. After all, you’ve been a black widow for years.”

  She stopped in her tracks, next to the tracks, and she slapped me. Hard. A hard, ringing, stinging slap.

  “What do you know?” she said. There was bitterness in the throaty voice, but something else too: pain.

  But I pressed on, my cheek flaming, like Estelle Carey in her final moments. “You want me to believe you weren’t keeping tabs on him for Ricca? That you didn’t send him out to meet his death on his regular walk, today?”

  “I don’t care what you believe.”

  She slowed. She stopped. She turned to me.

  “I loved Frank,” she said. “I loved him for years. And he came to love me. He worshipped Anna, but he loved me.”

  “Goddamn,” I said, stopped in my tracks now. “I believe you.”

  She shook her head slowly, lecturing with a jerky finger. “Perhaps some…some… of what you said is true…but know this: I was never in Ricca’s pocket. I never betrayed Frank. I didn’t blackmail him into marriage. I’m no black widow! No black widow.” She sat down, on the slope, by the tracks. “Just a widow. Another widow.”

  I sat next to her. “I’m sorry.”

  It was still raining, a little. Still drizzling.

  She was breathing heavily. “I understand. You felt something for my husband. That’s what caused your anger.”

  “I guess so.”

  The pain was showing on her face now. “It’s hard to lose him like this. Death by his own hand.”

  “My father committed suicide,” I said.

  She looked at me.

  “He put a bullet in his head, too.” I looked at her. “It’s something you learn to live with, but you never forget.”

  “Perhaps you’ve lost another father today.”

  “That’s putting it a little strong. But I am sorry to see the old bastard go.”

  Then I looked at her again and she was weeping. The steel lady was weeping.

  So I put my arm around her and she wept into my shoulder.

  When I left her at her door, the boy was just getting home.

  MRS. NITTI (WITH EDWARD O’HARE, JR.)

  I had supposed the final favor Frank Nitti promised me was one he’d been unable to keep. After all, I asked him Thursday night; and Friday afternoon he was dead.

  But Saturday morning a pale, shaking Barney Ross, in civvies for a change, brown jacket, gray slacks and a hastily knotted tie under a wrinkled gray raincoat, came into my office, around eleven, slamming the door behind him.

  I was standing at Gladys’s desk, handing her my notes on an insurance report.

  “We gotta talk,” he said. He was sweating. It was starting to look and feel just a little like spring out there, but nobody was sweating yet. Except Barney.

  Gladys seemed thrown by this uncharacteristically sloppy, angry Barney Ross. And it took quite a bit to throw a cool customer like her.

  “Forget this last report,” I told her. “Go ahead and take off a little early.” We only worked till noon on Saturday.

  “Sure, Mr. Heller,” she said, rising, gathering her things. “See you Monday.” And, with one last wide-eyed glance back at us, she was out the door.

  “Step into my office,” I said, gesturing, smiling.

  His one arm hung at his side, hand shaking; the other leaned against the wooden walking stick, which trembled like a coconut palm in a storm. “Did you do this, Nate?”

  “Step into my office. Sit down. Take a load off.”

  He went ahead of me, as quickly as his walking stick would allow; sat down. I got behind the desk. He was rubbing his hands on his trousered thighs. He didn’t look at me.

  “Did you do this thing to me?”

  “Do what, Barney?”

  Now he tried to look at me, but it was hard for him; his eyes darted around, not lighting anywhere. “Nobody’ll sell me anything. I need my medicine, Nate.”

  “You mean you need a fix.”

  “It’s for my headaches, and earaches. The malaria relapses. Goddamn, if you don’t understand this, who would?”

  “Go to a doctor.”

  “I… I used up the doctors the first three weeks, Nate. The
y’ll only give me a shot, once. I had to go to the streets.”

  “Where you’ve found your supply has suddenly dried up.”

  “You did it, didn’t you? Why did you do it?”

  “What makes you think I did?”

  His sweaty face contorted. “You’ve got the pull with the Outfit boys. You coulda gone straight to Nitti himself. That’s what it would take, to dry this town up for me like this.”

  “Don’t you read the papers, pal? Nitti’s dead.”

  “I don’t care. You did it. Why? Aren’t you my friend?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t hang around with junkies.”

  He covered his face with one hand; he was shaking bad. “You can’t stop me. I’m going back out on the road tomorrow. Back on the war-plant circuit. I can find what I need in any town I want. All I got to do is find a new doctor each time—they’ll give it to me. They know who I am, they’ll trust me. They know I’m traveling with a Navy party on this tour…they got no reason to think I’m looking for anything but just one shot of morphine for a malaria flare-up.”

  “Sure,” I said. “That’ll work. And when you run out of doctors, you can go back to the street, to the pushers. But not here. Not in Chicago.”

  “Nate… I live here.”

  “You used to. Maybe you better move to Hollywood with your movie-star wife. You can go make your connection out there. I can’t stop that.”

  “Nate! What are you doing to me?”

  “What are you doing to yourself?”

  “I’ll get past this.”

  “That’s a good idea. Get past it. Get some help. Kick this thing.”

  He screwed his face up, sweat still beading his brow. “You know what the papers’ll do with this? Look what happened to D’Angelo—all that poor bastard did was write some love letters, and they ruined him.”

  I shrugged. “I talked to him a couple of days ago. He’s fine. They’re fitting him a leg. He’ll be working someplace, before you know it. He understands that this thing we went through, we got to put it behind us. You got to put the Island behind you, too, Barney.”

  He was almost crying, now. “How could I ever face people? How can I tell Cathy? What would Ma say, and my brothers and my friends? What…what would Rabbi Stein think? Barney Ross, the kid from the ghetto who became champ, the guy they call a war hero and the idol of kids, a sickening, disgusting dope addict! The shame of it, Nate. The shame…”