MURDER BY THE NUMBERS (Eliot Ness)

by Max Allan Collins

  "Why don't you think it over, Frank. Talk to your lawyer about it."

  He snorted a laugh. "You're dreaming. Ness. Nobody's gonna stool on the Mayfield boys. You ain't gonna get no help on this. You're all alone."

  "Frank, you're wrong. When people start talking, and I start putting the 'boys' away, you're going to wish you'd gotten on my team while there was still time."

  "I don't think so. Who's gonna talk? Hell, you can't get to me and I'm white, for Christ's sake. You think the jigs are gonna talk to you?"

  Hogey began to laugh. His laughter bounced off the walls of the small interrogation room.

  "See you in court, Frank," Ness said, but Hogey only laughed more.

  Ness closed the door on the cubicle and nodded to the cop on duty to haul Hogey to the lock-up.

  He met Curry in the hallway.

  "Any luck?" he asked Curry, who had been interrogating the Negroes arrested on the raid.

  "None," Curry said. "Oh, that guy who made a run for it—Junior—he had an outstanding burglary rap; broke his collarbone, incidentally. How about you? You have any luck with Hogey?"

  "I'd have done better," Ness said with a sigh, "betting a buck on the numbers."

  It was now nearing ten. Ness decided it was time to think about supper. That might remove the gnawing feeling in his gut.

  But somehow he didn't think it would.

  CHAPTER 7

  Past midnight, on a Thursday night, in a black business district on Carnegie, not far from the east side market, Angelo Scalise exited the alley next to the Elite Cabaret, wiping the blood off his hands with a hanky. The night was dark and cold and not a soul was on the street; but the Elite was open, and so was the restaurant next door, Pig Foot Heaven, out of which came smells so foul Angelo thought he might puke. A few other storefronts were open on these couple of blocks; several bars, a barbecue stand, and a barbershop-numbers drop, where the "hep cats" paid to get their kinky hair straightened ("conked") by a mixture of Vaseline and potash lye.

  In a black tailored suit with a black shirt and white tie and a black fedora with white band, Angelo looked as dapper as a zoot-suited Negro pimp. But he would have hated to hear that comparison: He had only contempt for "niggers." The only thing he liked about niggers was their money. The dumb monkeys were poor as piss ants but they gambled every damn day of their life, trying to hit that, lucky number. He laughed to himself, wadding the bloody handkerchief, kneeling at a nearby steaming sewer grating, where he dumped it. He stood and lit up a cigarette and smiled.

  A couple exited the Elite, dressed to the teeth. The man, a big, chiseled-featured Negro of fifty-some years, wore a camel-hair topcoat, under which flashed a yellow silk shirt and a dark blue tie; he had fingers full of jewelry—the gaudiest example being a heavy gold signet with a ruby, which was his lodge ring—but the woman on his arm was equally expensive. A "high-yellow gal" in buffalo-fur coat under which could be glimpsed a low-cut dress as pink as Pepto-Bismol. Her high heels clicked on the pavement. Both man and woman were bathed in neon, the man's dark complexion and her lighter one turning strange decorative shades.

  The man was Willie "the Emperor" Rushing, one of the policy kings that Angelo and his cousin Sal had moved in on, five years ago. Willie resented the Mayfield gang—of that Angelo had no doubt—but the Emperor was their boy, now. With the expansion beyond the black district that the Mayfield gang had encouraged and made possible, Willie—even with kicking back 40 percent to Lombardi and Scalise—was still making good dough. Not what he had in the old days, Angelo realized; but Willie was alive and well, which was more than Rufus Murphy and dozens of others other could say—if dead niggers could talk.

  Willie and his woman stood at the curb; they were waiting for a taxi or their driver, Angelo supposed. Willie was whispering in the giggly girl's ear; she was drunk or hyped on something. Angelo cleared his throat.

  Willie looked over sharply; his eyes were as penetrating as knife blades. But his face softened into an insincere smile on seeing Angelo.

  "Mr. Scalise," he said, abandoning the girl and walking toward Angelo. The way he said "mister" made it sound like "mist."

  "Willie. Out for a big night? Is that your new wife?"

  "I ain't married yet, Mr. Scalise." Willie's smile was an ivory gash in his charcoal face. The Emperor had been married four times, each time to a showgirl like this yellow bitch undoubtedly was.

  "What's the latest on these Pittsburgh boys, Willie?"

  Willie shook his head. "Like I tol' you on the phone, Mr. Scalise, they is cutting in on our business something fierce. We oughta do something."

  "We will. You been approached?"

  "Me?"

  "You."

  Willie thought about that; tasted his tongue. Then he smiled and said, "Yeah, I was havin' a talk with 'em just this evening. I tol' 'em they could put their money where the sun don't shine."

  Angelo smiled; he patted the older man on the shoulder and said, "You're a good boy, Willie." The Emperor's face tightened, just barely, around his eyes.

  Then Willie said, "The one you oughta talk to is name of Rosato."

  "Rosato. Yeah. So I hear."

  "He's the turkey you're after, Mr. Scalise."

  Angelo gestured with his cigarette in hand, toward the nightclub behind them. "Hangs out here, I hear."

  "Yes, sir. He in there now."

  "So you were just talking to him."

  "That's right."

  "You didn't mention that."

  "I said they was coaxin' me this evening, Mr. Scalise."

  Tension was pulled tight as a wire in the nighttime quiet. A cat yowled and broke the moment.

  Angelo smiled. "So you did, son. So you did."

  Willie smiled synthetically and said, "Got to get back to my woman."

  "I wouldn't mind a taste of that little biffa myself."

  Angelo had just referred to the woman as a whore, in street parlance.

  "She ain't that kind of gal, Mr. Scalise," Willie said, quietly. He wasn't smiling now.

  Angelo shrugged. "No offense, Willie. Hey, here's your cab. Don't miss it."

  A yellow cab had just rolled up. Willie nodded and turned to join his antsy high-yellow gal and Angelo called out to him gently, "Don't worry about those Pittsburgh punks, Willie. By morning they'll be yesterday's news."

  Willie had an arm around the girl's fur-clad shoulder; she was as jumpy as a facial twitch. Willie flashed his ivory grin and said, "Hope so, Mr. Scalise. Them odds they're givin' is givin' us fits."

  The Emperor held the back door open for his woman, who got in, flashing a well-turned calf in a silk stocking. Yes indeed, Angelo thought, I'd certainly like a taste of that. Angelo's prejudices had their limits.

  Angelo sauntered into the low-ceilinged, modern bar. Pale copper wall lighting stained the tables where flashily attired patrons, black and white and many a shade in between, sat smoking, drinking, chatting. Smooth hustlers with conked hair sat playing sex games with their yellow chorus-girl bitches, whose faces were powdered ghost-white, long lacquered nails redder than blood, full mouths bruised a similar red. Blue-gray smoke streams twisted upward lazily through the murkily lit room, blending with the smell of whiskey, perfume, and sweat. The bandstand was empty, but the juke-box was pounding out Count Basic's "One O'clock Jump," and some couples, black and white, were cutting up a rug. Angelo didn't mind the music—you couldn't keep your damn toe from tapping to that jungle shit—but he didn't like seeing whites and coloreds mixing like that; but at least the whites were dancing with whites and blacks with blacks. Still, all in all, this old world was going to hell in a hand basket.

  This was one place where policy racketeers of both colors, and anybody with money and the inclination, could mingle. But it was not the kind of place where Angelo would go for any reason but business. Eyes flickered his way, though not obviously, as Angelo moved toward the circular mahogany bar. He ordered a whiskey and surveyed the room.

  Johnny Rosato
was seated at a corner booth with two of his cronies. They were parleying with a colored kid named Freddy Douglass. Douglass was a slickly dressed young man who worked for Frank Hogey, or anyway had, before Hogey got shut down, at least temporarily, by that bastard Ness.

  Douglass was (though of course Angelo did not know it) the man who had been standing talking to his girlfriend on the back steps of the house Ness had raided earlier that week.

  The four men had apparently not noticed Angelo come in, caught up in their own wheeling and dealing.

  Angelo finished his whiskey, waved off the black-uniformed bartender's offer of another. All of Angelo's drinks here were on the house, of course. He had much the same privileges as a cop.

  He walked cockily over to Rosato's table. Douglass caught first sight of Angelo, and his eyes were large and white in his dark face. Feet do yo' stuff, Angelo thought, and laughed to himself.

  Rosato, a heavy-set, nattily dressed man of about twenty-five, looked up at Angelo, blankly.

  "You want something?" Rosato asked, with bland menace.

  The other two, also well-dressed, a skinny kid of perhaps twenty with pockmarks and a short, sallow, dead-eyed hood, looked at Angelo with immediate contempt. None of them—except Douglass—recognized him.

  "Mr. Scalise," Douglass said, nervously, starting to get up. "I was just havin' a friendly drink ..."

  The white men at the table did their best to show no reaction to the name "Scalise"; all of them, to one extent or another, failed, although the dead-eyed one did the best job of it.

  "Go over to the bar, Freddy," Angelo said. "I want a private word with these gents."

  "Sure thing, Mr. Scalise," Freddy said, and climbed out of the booth quick as a rabbit.

  "Freddy," Scalise said, without looking at him. "Don't leave the premises. Stick around."

  "Sure thing, Mr. Scalise," he said, and was gone. Jesse Owens couldn't have beat him to the bar.

  "Have a seat, Scalise," Rosato said.

  Scalise pulled up a chair and sat facing all three men. He said, "Ain't they heard of respect in Pittsburgh?"

  Rosato's round face was impassive. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "It means most people call me 'Mr. Scalise.' It means you shoulda come callin' on me and Mr. Lombardi and paid your respects before setting up shop in our town."

  Rosato smiled faintly. "My apologies, Mr. Scalise. But I wasn't aware this was anybody's town. I thought this was America. In America a man can do business where he likes."

  Now Scalise smiled. The two bodyguards, or whatever the fuck they were, were staring at him. "This isn't America. This is Cleveland. In Cleveland, you want to check in with Mayfield Road before you get into business."

  "We don't see it that way. We think an open market is the American way. You and your cousin, you want to compete, then give your customers better odds. It's that simple."

  Angelo carefully took his cigarettes out of a side suitcoat pocket. He shook one out, tapped it on the tablecloth, and lit it. A smile lit up around it. He said, "Nothing is simple on the east side, Mr. Rosato. But I can make life a little less complicated for you."

  "Oh?"

  Angelo shrugged. "If you want to kick back forty percent of your take to us, we'll consider overlooking the lack of respect, the sense of common old-world courtesy, that you boys seem short on."

  Rosato's pleasantness dropped away like the facade it was. He leaned forward and spoke through clenched teeth. "You Mayfield Road boys are soft. Second-generation pussies. Inherited the family business from your daddies. Where I come from, we make our own way."

  "Really?"

  "You bastards are getting eaten up alive by that Boy Scout Ness. You're not on top of things. The ground is falling out from under you. We, on the other hand, we're sitting pretty."

  Angelo said nothing; his face was devoid of expression; his eyes were placid. He exhaled smoke.

  That seemed to unnerve Rosato a bit—which it was supposed to.

  With a magnanimous wave of the hand, Rosato said, "We're not telling you to shut your action down. We feel there's room in the marketplace for competition. Maybe we can both have a slice of the pie. Maybe the best man will win. That's the American way . . . Mr. Scalise."

  Angelo thought about that.

  Then he said, "Would you agree to raise your odds to the accepted 600 to 1?"

  Rosato did a poor job of suppressing a smile; obviously, he felt Angelo was showing his weakness already. But Rosato responded, toughly businesslike: "What would be in it for us?"

  "You wouldn't have to raise 'em right away. But once you're established, you'll have your customers. Why waste the honey, once you attracted all the fucking bees you need?"

  Rosato thought about that. "And there'd be no trouble between us?"

  "Well," said Angelo, with a winning smile, "my cousin won't like it. But he trusts me. He listens to me. I could swing it, yeah."

  Rosato laughed shortly. "For a price, you mean."

  "For a price. Not a piece of the action: a flat fee of ten grand."

  Rosato glanced at the dead-eyed man, who—a beat later— shrugged.

  "That might be possible," Rosato said.

  "And if you needed anything smoothed out," Angelo said, "you could come to me. In some cases, what the hell—I'll do you a little favor, out of friendship. Other times, it might cost you a little."

  "That could get out of hand. ..."

  "It won't. You got Angelo Scalise's word. But I don't want you to deal with me direct."

  "Who, then?"

  "There's a colored guy who works for me name of Leroy Simmons. He'll be our contact."

  Rosato smiled at the dead-eyed guy, who actually cracked a smile. So did the pock-marked kid.

  "Are you sure about that?" Rosato said, with smug amusement. "We recruited him tonight—not an hour ago. Right in this very club."

  "I know," Angelo said, easily. "I ran into him outside. I told him to wait."

  Rosato drew back. "Wait? What in hell for?"

  Angelo laughed. "I knew what he was doin' here. It's all over the east side that you gents are holdin' court here. When he saw me, well—afraid I scared him shitless."

  "Is that right?"

  Angelo gestured open-handedly. "I thought we might . . . work something out. Between gentlemen. So I 'recruited' Leroy myself. Let's go out and talk to him."

  The three men exchanged wary glances.

  Rosato said, "Why don't you go out and invite Leroy in?"

  Angelo frowned. "Are you fuckin' nuts? I don't want the three of us seen together." He meant Rosato, Leroy, and himself; he was excluding Rosato's goons in the head count.

  "I don't like it," Rosato said.

  "Hey—paesan. I'm not packin' heat, okay? You wanna frisk me when we get out there? Go ahead. I'm alone. You can bring your boys, I don't give a fuck."

  Rosato drew a slow breath. Then he and his goons ex-changed glances again and Rosato shrugged, to himself more than them, and said, "Okay. Let's go see Leroy."

  They abandoned the booth and left the club, Angelo taking the lead in his sauntering way.

  The night was chilly, but none of the men wore topcoats. Rosato and his boys had left theirs in the club; and Angelo had left his elsewhere, too.

  Rosato touched Angelo gently on the arm. "No offense— but I'm gonna take you up on your offer."

  "What offer?"

  "To let one of my boys frisk you."

  "No big deal." Angelo shrugged, good-naturedly.

  The dead-eyed sallow one patted Angelo down then looked at his boss and shrugged. Rosato nodded to him, then nodded to Angelo and said, "Where's Leroy?"

  "Step into my office, gents," Angelo said, gesturing to the alley.

  Rosato and his boys again traded glances, but they followed Angelo into the dark alley. They outnumbered him three to one, after all, and were armed and he wasn't.

  "Where the fuck is he?" Rosato demanded, unbuttoning his suitcoat. The alley was claus
trophobic and blacker than the east side and dead-ended at a row of garbage cans.

  "Right here," Angelo said, and he took Rosato gently by the arm and pointed to Leroy, a small, handsome, sharply dressed Negro who was sitting between two garbage cans with his throat slit.

  Rosato took a step backward as Angelo dipped down, plucked the switchblade from beside the corpse as the dead-eyed bodyguard moved forward. Angelo grinned and lashed out with the blade and cut the man across the throat. Those dead eyes opened very wide and a hand came up and gripped where he'd been slashed and blood streamed down and through his fingers in narrow red ribbons. He fell to his knees and his eyes were really dead when he flopped face-down on the cement near Leroy.

  Rosato was moving backward and the other bodyguard was coming forward, the skinny pockmarked kid, yanking a gun from under his suitcoat and Angelo kicked him in the balls and when the skinny kid curled forward, gun dropping from his popped-open fingers, Angelo smacked him on the jaw, a good sharp smack that took the kid's legs out from under him. Then the kid was clutching his nuts, on his back like a dog scratching itself, and Angelo jammed the switchblade into the kid's stomach. The pockmarked kid began to gurgle, but never really made much noise at all.

  The stunned Rosato was fumbling for a gun under his arm, but Angelo was on top of him, and pulled the suitcoat down around Rosato's shoulders, ripping it, pinning his arms, and hit Rosato in the forehead, violently, with his own forehead. The rush of pain felt just fine to Angelo.

  Rosato was on his knees now, as if praying, or about to beg, which perhaps he was.

  Angelo yanked Rosato's gun from its shoulder holster and stuck it in his own waistband and stood beside Rosato like a priest about to offer the host.

  "I'm not going to kill you," Angelo said pleasantly. "Not tonight. If you're still in town tomorrow, you'll be deader than shit. Deader than your boys, deader than that nigger fink over there."

  Rosato's whole face was trembling. "What . . . what do you want?"

  "I want you to get the fuck outa Cleveland, what do you think I want, goombah? You wanna come back with some soldiers and play war, well, us second-generation pussies would just think that's dandy. That's the 'American way,' ain't it? Elsewise, all I wanna see is the ass-end of ya."