MURDER BY THE NUMBERS (Eliot Ness)

by Max Allan Collins

  Toussaint Johnson, the instant he'd seen the blossom of gunfire and heard the shotgun's roar, had crossed his hands before him and yanked the twin silver revolvers from his shoulder holsters. His usually impassive face became another face, one of bulging eyes and flaring nostrils and a huge hole of a mouth. Screaming in wordless rage, he bolted across the street and up the lawn and began firing, one gun at a time, like something out of a Western movie, blowing the night apart with his gunfire. Rufus was falling, but the assassin had already leaped from behind the bushes and was cutting through the space between the house and the garage into the backyard.

  Johnson did not pause at Murphy's staring lifeless body, though it was jerking from reflex and spraying blood, speckling Johnson as he ran past, the detective nearly slipping in the already pooled blood. The assassin, thin as a blade, was knifing through the short backyard to the driveway of the adjacent house behind, where another vehicle waited, a black Ford sedan; both the assassin and the driver were white, that much Toussaint, even in the dark, on the run, could tell. Dressed in black, black fedora pulled down, the assassin carried the shotgun in his left hand like a relay racer's baton, and now twisted around to shoot a right-hand revolver at Toussaint, who hit the dirt, bullets flying overhead, crunching into the wood of the house behind. He went to return fire but the assassin was climbing into the rider's side of the sedan and the door shut just as Toussaint's next three thunderous shots puckered the metal door.

  The car squealed away and was kicking up gravel as it made its turn toward the street by the time Toussaint was standing in the drive, ready to fire again.

  He had missed the license plate, but earlier had caught a glimpse of the man's white face, a ghostly white male witch of a face with a pointed chin and a thin sharp nose; the pulled-down fedora obscured the rest.

  Behind him he heard screaming.

  A woman screaming. Mamie, Toussaint thought. Rufus's wife, wakened by the gunfire.

  He ran back to Murphy, and indeed his dead friend was in the arms of his beautiful portly widow, her white nightgown a blotter of crimson from the still-flowing blood. Toussaint stood helpless in the drive, the two fabled silver revolvers loose in the hands of his dangling arms, pointing impotently, limply down.

  The car was gone.

  So was Rufus Murphy.

  And Toussaint couldn't think of a damn thing to say or do, to comfort Mamie. He fell to his knees; blood dampened his trousers; tears dampened his face.

  He didn't say a word.

  But in his head Toussaint Johnson vowed to God or the devil or anyone who was interested that the men who did this would pay and the color of" their skin wouldn't mean shit.

  Only the color of their blood.

  ONE

  SEPTEMBER 26-OCTOBER 1O, 1938

  CHAPTER 2

  In the dimly lit, walnut-paneled lounge of the Hollenden Hotel, Eliot Ness was conducting a low-key, informal press conference with representatives of Cleveland's three major papers. It was Monday afternoon, just after three o'clock. Squeezed into one booth with Ness were burly Webb Seeley of the News, slim Clayton Fritchey of the Press, and lanky Sam Wild of the Plain-Dealer,

  Ness was seated with his back to the wall, as was his habit, and wore a .38 revolver in a shoulder holster, which was not; a strange mixture of the diplomat and the adventurer, Ness only wore a gun when he felt it unavoidable.

  He was director of public safety, the city official in charge of both the police and fire departments. Deep into his third year as the city's "top cop," Ness was still, at thirty-five, the youngest man in the nation to hold such a post.

  Despite his age, Ness was a veteran of what the papers melodramatically termed his "personal war on crime." At twenty-six he had headed up the Prohibition Bureau's Chicago unit, a handful of Ness-picked men who with their baby-faced leader came to be known as the "Untouchables," thanks to a deserved reputation for withstanding bribes, threats, and political pressure. In his successful campaign to land Al Capone in jail, and in later efforts against the bootleg gangs of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio, Eliot Ness earned a reputation for putting bad guys in the pen, while providing reporters with juicy headlines along the way.

  In the last three years, in Cleveland, he had made his share of headlines for the men at this table, certainly, headlines that reached across the nation, due to the unceasing series of major criminal investigations this young executive had launched, made all the more newsworthy because that young executive often got out from behind his desk and into the fray.

  First had come a no-holds-barred house-cleaning of the Cleveland P.D. that resulted in convictions and prison for six high-ranking crooked cops, followed by a wave of resignations from other panicking cops-on-the-take. Next the safety director had undertaken the search for the so-called "Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run," burning out the Hoovervilles where the mass murderer lived and preyed. Most recently Ness had taken on crooked labor racketeers, and the result was again convictions and prison for the perpetrators.

  The young safety director was beginning to show signs of the strain of all this; his boyish, faintly freckled face was looking fleshy and the placid gray eyes were pouched and bore crow's feet. His dark brown hair was touched lightly with gray at the temples, though a disobedient comma of dark brown hair touched his forehead in one stubborn flourish of youth.

  Ness, dapper in a gray worsted suit with a knit shades-of-gray striped tie and monogrammed breast-pocket handkerchief, sat quietly with his hands folded; he might have been praying had his lips not worn a slight, playful smile. While the reporters drank their second round (bourbon for Wild, Scotch for Fritchey, and a beer for Seeley), Ness was working on his first drink: a cup of black coffee.

  "You've never been known to pass up a drink, Eliot," Sam Wild said, with a good-natured edge. "Even when you are buying. ..."

  Wild was a pale, dark-blond scarecrow of man, his features angular, pointed, giving him a pleasantly satanic look; he wore a red bow tie and canary seersucker suit. Ness was accessible to all the press and counted many reporters, including those seated here, as friends; but Wild, assigned by the Plain-Dealer to cover Ness full time, was part of the safety director's inner circle, and sometimes unofficially took on investigative work for Ness that an official staff member dared not. And was as close a friend as this shy, private public official had.

  Wild had, in the latter capacity, accompanied an inebriated Ness home from time to time; the irony of the world's most famous prohibition agent being a hard drinker was not lost on the reporter.

  "Something's up, Eliot," Wild said. "Or you wouldn't be teetotaling it this afternoon."

  "Something is up," Ness admitted, with an ornery child's smile. "I guess you know that we've been zeroing in on the Mayfield Road bunch."

  "With labor out of the way," Fritchey drawled, nodding, "and the police department pretty well sanitized, it would seem about time you took those boys on, directly."

  Webb Seeley shrugged. "You already chased Horvitz and Rothkopf and McGinty and their gambling interests out of the county."

  "Hell," said Fritchey, "out of state—they're operating in northern Kentucky, now."

  "Those boys," Wild put in, with one arched eyebrow, "are getting more and more into legitimate concerns. Even Chuck Polizzi is playing it cool. He's leaving it all to Lombard! and Scalise."

  Ness was nodding. His smile had disappeared. He lifted a forefinger and waggled it like a scolding schoolteacher.

  "Those two," he said, quietly ominous, "are next."

  "Is that why you've been hitting the bookie joints so hard?" Seeley asked. "Getting so's a feller can't make an honest bet."

  "What bookie joints are those?" Wild said, almost disgruntledly, swirling his bourbon in his glass. "Our esteemed safety director has shut down every bookie joint I know of. This city is getting as boring as its reputation, thanks to young Mr. Ness, here."

  Seeley sipped his beer and said to Ness, "We lost count at eighty-four times in one month,
when your men Powers and Allen kept raiding that same bookie joint . . . busted up the place so often the poor bastard bookie had to put two full-time carpenters on staff, to keep the place up and running. Finally said the hell with it and closed up shop."

  "So what's left?" Fritchey asked. He laughed humorlessly. "The numbers game? You going to try to clean up the colored east side? That's rich."

  Ness had an impassive expression, though a crease between his eyebrows belied that. He said, "First things first. There's another raid to make. Right here in downtown Cleveland."

  "Another raid?" Seeley said. "What, is some penny-ante joint crouching in some corner somewhere? After you shuttered Maxie Diamond, what the hell is left?"

  About a month before. Ness had invited the press along to view—and record—a lightning-swift raid on downtown Cleveland's biggest and busiest bookie joint, run by Maxie Diamond. A cigar counter and soft-drink machine provided the front for the East Ninth Street betting hall, and a bell and light system warned operators and players if any cops should arrive. Secret panels were built in the walls for racing sheets, telephones, betting slips, and playing cards to be stowed away, and in a secret room in the rear, a trapdoor and hidden panel permitted escape.

  Diamond's success led to the construction of a second betting room in the basement; carpenters and electricians were put to work on what would have been a concrete anti-police fortress with steel doors. Ness had put an undercover man in the Diamond joint, and the undercover man tipped the safety director that the escape paths would be temporarily blocked because of the construction.

  "We got some great pics on that little raiding party," Seeley said with a contented sigh. "Lucky for you Maxie didn't have those steel doors up. Even the great Ness couldn't kick in those babies."

  There were smiles all around, Ness included, but Wild said, "Come on, fellas. Just because the bookie joints are pretty much shut down, that doesn't mean bettin' the horses in Cleveland is a thing of the past."

  "Lombardi is taking a cue from his own racket," said Fritchey, casually. "Just like the numbers game—he's using runners."

  "Right," Ness said, nodding. "Commission men. They work the streets, and call in the bets. Work for five percent of the bets plus a percentage of the winnings of their 'clients.' "

  Wild raised an eyebrow. "Hell, that is a page right out of the numbers racket ..."

  "Black Sal Lombardi is nothing if not a shrewd business-man," Ness said, with grudging respect. "He's reduced his overhead and, at the same time, worked out a system that keeps crowds from congregating in one place and attracting police suspicion."

  "With bookies continually calling in their bets," Wild said, "they don't have to haul around pocketsful of betting slips, meaning they won't get collared with any slips in their possession."

  "No betting slips," Fritchey said, with a world-weary little shrug, "no evidence for a conviction."

  "The perfect crime," Seeley said.

  "No," said Ness, and a tiny smug smile tugged one corner of his mouth. "It's smooth, it's smart . . . but perfect it's not."

  "Where's the loophole?" Wild said. "How do you raid a bookie joint that isn't there? What are you going to do, kick in the door of every phone booth in town?"

  Ness sipped his coffee, savoring the strong brew, and the moment. He said, "Those phone calls the bookies make have somebody on the other end of 'em."

  The reporters began to slowly nod.

  "We've learned," Ness said, "that there is a 'nerve center,' with several dozen warm bodies working a battery of phones. That nerve center is within spitting distance, gentlemen."

  "Yeah?" Wild said, sitting forward.

  "It's on the seventh floor of the old Leader Building," Ness said, pointing. "Right across the street."

  "Hot damn," Wild said. "When do we go?"

  "Right now," Ness said. "You go call your photographers. Meet me across the street, in the Leader lobby, in five minutes."

  The reporters were going even as the last word left Ness's lips.

  Ness signed the check, slipped on his dark gray fedora, and, walking through the hotel's drugstore, stepped outside onto Sixth Street where a golden Indian summer afternoon awaited. He stood back from the stream of pedestrians for a moment and drank in the day. The Hollenden Hotel at his back, a fourteen-story red-brick Victorian structure on the southeast corner of Superior and Sixth, was the center of downtown Cleveland's social life. Public Square was a stone's throw away. City Hall, where the safety director's office was, was but a short walk north; there were several newspapers nearby, including the Plain-Dealer Building across the way diagonally. On the southwest side of Superior and Sixth was the tall gray nondescript Leader Building (the Leader, once a major Cleveland paper, had been swallowed up by the News years before).

  This was the heart of the city—swarming with politicians, lawyers, newsmen, business executives, sportsmen. What better place for the nerve center of the city's gambling syndicate?

  Jaywalking with care, the director of public safety crossed to the side entrance of the Leader Building, between a haberdashery and a cigar store. In the glorified hallway of a lobby, a bank of elevators on either side, Robert Chamberlin and several plainclothes cops were waiting.

  "Got everything covered?" Ness asked his executive assistant. "Stairs, elevators, fire escape?"

  "Yes indeed," Chamberlin said, a smile twitching under his tiny black mustache. "The press on the way?"

  "They're scurrying after their photogs like rats after cheese."

  "Knowing the sporting habits of the local press," Chamberlin smirked, "I can't think they'll be eager to see us close this shop down."

  Chamberlin was a tall broad-shouldered man nearing forty, a lawyer who was equally at home with investigative and administrative duties. Shovel-jawed and sharp featured, with dark slicked-back hair, he had a military bearing that was partly offset by a wry sense of humor.

  "Wild and the others do like to gamble," Ness admitted. "But they love a headline."

  "Yes," said Chamberlin, "and we like to gamble, too, don't we? Tipping the press before a raid . . . they could leak it."

  "That's why I waited till you'd had a chance to seal this building up," Ness said, "before I told 'em."

  "There is a new wrinkle."

  "Oh?"

  "Shades of Maxie Diamond—they've installed a metal door."

  "You're kidding; right in the hallway of an office building? That's a little conspicuous, isn't it?"

  Chamberlin shook his head, no. "It's on the inside. I sent Al Curry up there posing as a confused Western Union messenger who went to the wrong office, and he got a good look. There's a receptionist in an outer office, and a big, heavy, gray steel door leads to the inner office, where the nerve center is."

  Ness thought about that. "They'll be sitting at tables writing bets down on flash paper, with matches at their fingertips and wastebaskets at their feet. Damn."

  "It's going to be tough to get in there before the evidence is ashes," Chamberlin admitted. "The receptionist obviously is a lookout man—a better-looking lookout man than the Mayfield Road boys usually utilize, if Curry's to be believed . . . but a lookout man nonetheless."

  "Nobody's up on the seventh floor yet?"

  "Right. Garner and the raiding party are waiting on the sixth floor, as you instructed."

  Ness checked his watch. He made a clicking sound and said, "The reporters will be here any second. You bring 'em up to the seventh floor at four o'clock sharp."

  "That's just ten minutes from now. . . ."

  "Right," Ness said, and took the freight elevator up to the sixth floor.

  There he found Will Garner, vice cop Frank Moeller, and three more plainclothes cops waiting. Garner was a beefy six-four detective whose dark complexion and black hair reflected his Sioux heritage; he had been one of Ness's Untouchables in the Chicago days. Moeller was a pleasant, brown-haired, bullet-headed man who was about five pounds shy of heavy-set.

  "C
urry's covering the alley and the fire escape?" Ness asked.

  Garner nodded.

  "When do we go in?" Moeller asked.

  "At four," Ness said.

  "How?" the Indian said.

  "You're going to walk right in through the receptionist's office; at four, somebody inside is going to unlock that steel door."

  "Who's going to do that?" Moeller asked, wincing with confusion.

  "Me," Ness said, lifting the metal lid off one of the two massive garbage cans that sat to one side of the freight elevator. The lid was like an ungainly, battered shield; Ness gripped it in his left hand.

  The door to the fire escape was nearby; Ness walked to it, looked at Garner significantly, and said, "Four sharp."

  Then Ness went out on the black metal stairway; the pleasant, nearly warm day seemed windier up here. He glanced down and waved to Albert Curry, who was standing guard below, by the loading dock. Then he climbed the fire-escape stairs to the seventh floor and moved along the catwalk of the 'scape till he came to the window he was looking for.

  He knelt on the gridwork floor, one hand clutching the garbage can lid, fingertips of the other hand caressing the rough surface of the concrete building. He peeked carefully into the room. No drapes or blinds obscured the view; these crooks were bold. Or careless. He would have installed bur-glar-proof wire-mesh glass. But an operation like this had to keep moving, like a floating crap game, and renovations would seem too much bother, too much expense, for a temporary facility. Ness had counted on that.

  At least thirty people were at work in the large office; several long, banquet-style tables filled the otherwise empty room, with people sitting on both sides, and everyone—except a few bouncer-like types who were either guards or supervisors or both—was busy on the phone every minute. And, as he'd figured, books of matches and wastebaskets were kept handy. He caught a glimpse of the formidable gray steel door.