MURDER BY THE NUMBERS (Eliot Ness)

by Max Allan Collins

  Johnson's smile widened, but showed no teeth. Calmly he said, "We found a topcoat in a garbage can."

  "So I hear," Ness said.

  "Had a label from some fancy haberdashery in Terminal Tower. A white man's topcoat, you ask me."

  "Well, I am. Asking you."

  Johnson nodded. "Blood all over the top part. Blood type matches one of the dead fellas—Leroy Simmons. Kind of a spurtin' pattern on the coat."

  "Splashed there," Ness said, "when somebody's throat got cut."

  "Exactly."

  "What does it add up to?"

  Johnson shrugged. "Adds up to the Pittsburgh boys has all packed up and gone home. The east side is Lombardi's again, and the odds on the numbers is back to 500 to 1. Is what it adds up to."

  "I'd like that coat," Ness said. "Maybe we can track the owner."

  "I could use some help at that," Johnson said, and sipped his beer.

  "So could I. I've been checking up on you, Johnson. Your record is good. Damn good."

  Johnson's smile flashed white, suddenly. "If I wasn't already on the force, you think I could get on?"

  That stung Ness, and it was close to impertinent; but he had to give the man his balls for making the remark.

  "Yes I do," Ness said. "You have a high school education, and you served in the war, and well. I'd like a hundred like you."

  "Maybe you would," Johnson said. "That way the Call and Post might get off your ass."

  Curry swallowed and looked at his boss. Ness was impassive for a moment, but then he laughed.

  "You're so right," Ness said. "Are you interested in working with me, and my staff, on this numbers investigation?"

  "I thought you'd never ask," Johnson said, smiling again, but not whitely.

  "You have a personal stake in this, after all."

  "Yes I do. You got a right to know this, Mr. Ness. I was a friend of Rums Murphy, the policy king. Before I was a cop, I was a bouncer in a place of his. Anyway. He was shot right in front of my eyes. I'm sure it was Lombardi's doing, and Scalise. I swore over my friend's bleeding body I'd get those bastards."

  "Why haven't you? You've been a cop all these years."

  Johnson laughed; it was as explosive as it was brief. "Mr. Ness, before you started kickin' these crooked cops outa their cushy jobs, nobody was a cop in this town, badge or not. There was pressure and there was politics and there was a lot of money floatin' around up above me. All of that kept me from doin' anything about going after Murphy's killers. I was ordered off that case. I was told if I went near it, I'd be off the damn force."

  "I'm surprised that stopped you."

  "It didn't. I been talkin' to people for years. I know dozens of witnesses who could put those tally bastards behind bars. But I can't get nobody to talk in public."

  "Are we still up against that? Is this a dead end?"

  Johnson shook his head, no. "Not if we team up, you and me. Without me, you can't do it. You don't know who to talk to. You wouldn't know how to talk to 'em, if you knew who to talk to. I know. Who. And how."

  "But you've known that for five years, and what has it got you?"

  "Not a damn thing—except, I know where the bodies is buried. Better still, I know who knows where the bodies is buried. And with my street savvy, and you to back me up, we can find witnesses, all right."

  Ness's eyes narrowed. "My backing you up will do that?"

  "It will. The east side may not love you, Mr. Ness, but they trust you to do what you say you'll do. They know you're not crooked. They know when you say you'll protect a witness, you'll protect a witness. That union deal proved that. Together, Mr. Ness, we can turn Mayfield Road into a goddamn parkin' lot."

  Ness grinned. "You come through for me. Detective Johnson, and you'll be the first Negro sergeant on the force."

  "I was hopin' for chief," Johnson said, deadpan. "But I'll settle."

  The two men shook hands again.

  "You had supper?" Johnson said, getting up. He shambled out of the bar, climbing into a rumpled brown topcoat as he did, and Ness and Curry followed him.

  "No," Ness said.

  Curry shook his head, no.

  "They serve up a mean gumbo down the street," Johnson said, pointing with a thumb. The street was dark, now, neon standing out starkly in the night.

  "What's gumbo?" Curry asked.

  "New Orleans dish, isn't it?" Ness asked.

  "That's right," Johnson said. "Made outa pork, chicken gizzards, okra, sweet potatoes, shrimp, spices, herbs . . . but Pappy's down the street has got a secret ingredient."

  "What's that?" Curry asked.

  "Goat testicles," Johnson said.

  The two white men, whiter than usual, thanked the Negro cop for his offer but tactfully declined.

  As they left in the EN-1 sedan, Ness thought he heard roaring laughter behind him.

  CHAPTER 9

  Toussaint Johnson was well aware that Al Curry was ill at ease, riding around the colored east side in Johnson's used Chevy sedan. Johnson did nothing in particular to add to the young detective's uneasiness; neither did he do anything in particular to lessen it. Toussaint Johnson had spent going on forty years as a black man in a white-ruled world, and he didn't mind seeing any white man get a sample of what it was like to be the minority.

  This was their first day on the east side, in their attempt to gather witnesses for Ness, and Johnson had met Curry's attempts at making conversation with polite but terse and sometimes sardonic responses.

  "What's it like working this side of town?" Curry had asked, as the sedan bumped over the ruts of Scovill Avenue.

  "Lively," Johnson had replied.

  "How can these people stand living like this?" Curry had later asked, with no condescension and with considerable sympathy.

  "Day a time," Johnson had replied.

  So it had gone for a while, and now Curry had lapsed into a morose silence.

  That was fine with Johnson. He didn't like conversation for the sake of conversation with anybody, color aside. His wife, Maybelle, was a chatterbox, God bless her, and he had learned how to have lengthy conversations with her without listening to anything she—or for that matter, he himself— said.

  He lived with Maybelle and their two boys and one daughter in a white frame house in a mixed neighborhood off Hough Avenue, near League Park, where the Cleveland Indians had played till the Municipal Stadium was built a few years back. His son Clarence was the star quarterback at East High, and his younger son William was an honor student. Johnson felt no guilt about living in a better neighborhood than the colored citizens of the Roaring Third who he served and protected. But he didn't feel superior to those people. Just luckier.

  He had grown up in Central Scovill, the Bucket of Blood his backyard. Actually, he'd been born in a small South Carolina hamlet, but had no memories of it; his father and mother had moved north shortly after his birth. His parents had worked as domestics, in the South, and in Cleveland, Papa had got work as a waiter at a chi-chi hotel called Wade Park Manor, while mama worked as a housekeeper-cook for a wealthy white family in Shaker Heights. Both were God-fearing folks and had a Booker T. Washington advance-through-hard-work way of looking at things.

  Young Toussaint had learned to read in his own home—a cramped one-room apartment in Central Scovill, at first, and later the top half of a frame duplex—and his primers had been everything from the Bible to W.E.B. Du Bois. He'd attended predominantly black Central High School and got high marks.

  But Toussaint Johnson had never completely been able to buy into the Booker T. Washington philosophy. It sounded good on paper, but he saw too many folks of his race struggling and getting nowhere, his parents among them. What finally turned things around for Papa and Mama was when Papa won ten bucks in a dice game in the basement at the hotel, played it on 714 on the "money row" and hit for five thousand dollars.

  Papa and Mama had then opened a little restaurant called Pappy's on Scovill and did very well after that—until
Papa got robbed and killed in the restaurant, late one night just before closing.

  Mama died the year after that. They called it a heart attack, but Toussaint knew that nothing had attacked her heart: It was flat-out broke in two.

  What Toussaint Johnson had learned from all this was that life was a matter of luck, good and bad. But this was something he knew in his head; in his soul somewhere his mama had instilled enough of that Booker T. Washington work ethic that he kept trying hard, trying to get ahead, and his father's killing had given him a goal: He wanted to be a cop. He had seen the white cops dismiss his papa's murder as just another "shine" killing. And he saw that there was a need for good Negro cops in this bad Negro district.

  The best place to get trained for that, he figured, was the army, and there was a war on, so he enlisted in Company D of the Ninth Battalion of the 372nd Regiment, Cleveland's all-Negro militia unit. He left his younger brother Edward to take the restaurant over, and soon found himself in France in combat.

  Even in the army, even in a black company, the white man's influence prevailed. Their Negro commanding officers, Major John A. Fulton and Captain William Green, fine leaders, were relieved of duty and discharged as "physically unfit" before the company was sent overseas. Maybe if they'd been left in charge, Johnson often thought, Company D wouldn't have lost so many men. Johnson, like the other Company D survivors of the Argorrne, came home wounded, and a recipient of France's highest military medal, the Croix de Guerre.

  One of Johnson's fellow Company D survivors was Eustice N. Raney, who'd been a few years ahead of Toussaint at Central High. While they weren't close friends, Johnson and Raney liked and respected each other. They had both basked in the glow of the heroes' reception Company D received, including a parade in downtown Cleveland. Raney, however, had gone on to law school, while Johnson had found himself in deep shit.

  Toussaint's brother Edward had lost the restaurant in a dice game. Edward had sold the family house and headed out for parts unknown. Toussaint never saw his brother again.

  This left the Company D veteran—like so many others— without a job and with few prospects for one. Within weeks his sense of being a survivor, of being a hero and on top of the world, had faded back into the reality of being a young Negro hi an old, white world. He applied to the police department but was turned down. He kept re-applying with the same result, while working a variety of day labor jobs and, for half a year, shoveling coal at Republic Steel.

  About the only good thing that happened in those days was meeting Maybelle, a waitress at Pappy's, which Toussaint had continued to frequent. She was a beautiful chocolate-brown talkative girl with a generous figure and a good sense of humor that even getting pregnant couldn't faze, particularly since Toussaint was amenable to marrying her.

  By 1922 Johnson's Company D compatriot Eustice Raney was making a name for himself in the colored community; he had graduated law school and with the help of Negro businessmen and politicians got himself appointed the city's first black police prosecutor. Raney's backers included the east side policy kings, and he helped Toussaint Johnson and half a dozen other Company D vets get jobs with Rufus Murphy and others.

  Johnson became a bouncer for a Murphy associate, Gus "Bunch Boy" Smith, at his gambling den on the second story of a house on Central Avenue. It was Johnson's job to collect the guns and shivs off players before they were allowed in, and to watch for police raids, pressing a loose nail in the door frame to blink the lights.

  During this same period, Toussaint never stopped applying to the police department. He saw no irony in his situation, as certain rackets on the east side—the numbers in particular, gambling in general—seemed only technically illegal to him. He wanted on the force to nail evil bastards like the robber that killed his papa, like the con men that stole old people's money with words, like the muggers and purse-snatchers and other thieves who preyed on the innocent.

  One day in 1927, Prosecutor Raney asked Toussaint to drop by his office at the Criminal Courts Building.

  Raney, a stocky, pleasant-featured light-skinned Negro with sharp, dark eyes, had sat behind a big mahogany desk with his hands folded like a preacher. His smile was gentle and a touch self-satisfied as he said, "They tell me you apply to the police department about three times a week."

  "They exaggerating," Johnson said. "Some."

  "I want representatives of our race on the department. There are people in city government who agree with me. White people. And a hell of a lot of Negroes on the east side feel that way. We need Negro cops. You're going to be one of them."

  "Good."

  "You have a fine war record, and a high school education. Good grades, too. Why didn't you go to college, Toussaint?"

  "Money."

  "What about your family's restaurant?"

  "Lost it."

  "Oh. Well, your latest application is going to be approved. Needless to say, your affiliation with Mr. Rufus Murphy will come in handy."

  "I ain't gonna roust Murphy ..."

  "You might on occasion, for appearance sake." Raney smiled slyly. "No, Toussaint, Mr. Murphy is a friend of mine and a campaign contributor. You'll still be working for him, in capacities that you and he will determine. This is the last you and I will speak of it, because there might be, in the eyes of some, a certain . . . conflict of interests."

  "You won't take the fall," Johnson assured him, "if it comes to that. I'm willing to take the job and what comes with it."

  "Good!" Raney stood behind the desk and smiled and the two men shook hands. In two days Johnson's application was officially accepted.

  The years that followed had been rewarding ones, in just about every sense. With his cop's pay and certain compensations from Rufus Murphy, Johnson was able to move his wife and two kids to the white-frame house on Hough. And he had racked up an arrest and conviction record second to nobody in the crime-ridden Roaring Third. Commendations overflowed in his file.

  The gravy train had slowed, though, when the policy kings got overthrown by those tally bastards from Murray Hill. Added to that was the pain and sorrow of losing Rufus Murphy, of having this second father shot right out from under his file-folder-full-of-commendations ass.

  But now there was a chance for recompense. Now there was a chance, finally, to revenge himself on those white sons-of-bitches. Now there was a chance, finally, to start putting money in the bank again, maybe put his two boys in college, give them a shot at a decent life.

  He'd gone to Raney's law offices just yesterday and the councilman, looking fatter and sassier but with the same sharp hard look in his eyes, had told Johnson to cooperate with Ness.

  "Ness works for Burton," Raney said, "and the Mayor needs the Negro vote—both in the council and at the polls."

  "Ness don't cut deals," Johnson said.

  "I know he doesn't. But he did have a meeting with Reverend Hollis yesterday evening, and gave certain assurances to Hollis."

  "What kind?"

  "Ness told Hollis he couldn't promise he'd cast an entirely benign eye on the numbers racket, once it got back in colored hands. But he admitted that it would not be high on his list of priorities.''

  "That's 'bout as close to a deal as you can get out of Ness," Johnson admitted. "Mayor must've put the pressure on."

  "I'm sure he did. You spoke to Ness yourself?"

  "Yes—right before he talked to Hollis, 'pears."

  "And?"

  "Ness had plenty of time to ask me about my ties to the numbers kings—and didn't."

  Raney beamed. "Good, good. With the seal of approval of both Ness and Hollis, you may find yourself some witnesses."

  "Maybe. But the Mayfield boys killed three men the other night. Two white and a colored."

  "So I hear."

  "That send a message 'cross the east side that ain't easy to unsend."

  Raney's smile disappeared and he said, "I have confidence in you, Toussaint."

  "I have confidence in dry ammunition, councilman.
"

  Now Toussaint Johnson and his white companion Curry were trying to put the designs of this unlikely coalition—Mayor Burton, Eliot Ness, Councilman Raney, and Reverend Hollis—into motion. They were walking into a Central Avenue poolroom called the Eight Ball.

  Behind a squared-off counter at the left as you came in sat a chunky cue ball-bald Negro wearing a green eyeshade, collarless white shirt, and black vest with a gold chain. He was perched on a high stool, like a frog who thought he was a prince, guarding the cash register like it was his crown jewels, overlording six pool tables arranged in pairs of three. Cones of light spread from hanging lamps, cutting the dark, smoky parlor geometrically. It was the middle of the morning and only a couple of the tables were in use.

  Slippery Stevens, wearing a dark suit and a dark tie and dark glasses, looked like a blind skinny undertaker. He was practicing; he couldn't find many locals to play him, good as he was. Johnson and Curry stood watching as Slippery chalked up a cue, placed the cue ball on its marker, stroked smooth and broke the balls, scattering them like gamblers out the back door when a raid was coming down. Five dropped into pockets, and then Slippery ran the rest, balls clicking like castanets. It took about two minutes.

  Curry was visibly impressed.

  Slippery leaned against the table, chalking his cue; his smile was as crooked as he was.

  "Toussaint, my man," he said. He said the name like too-saunt. "Who's the ofay motherfucker?"

  Curry blinked. Johnson repressed a smile; he had a notion that this casual term—"motherfucker"—was new to the white boy—possibly the very idea it expressed was new to him. But Curry didn't seem offended—just surprised.

  "He's the man," Johnson said.

  "Hell, Toussaint—you the man."

  "He's the man, too. And he's with me. Call him a motherfucker again and you'll have to squat to take your next shot."

  Slippery's smile vanished, then returned. "So what's up, gentlemens?"

  "I'm surprised to find you here," Johnson said. "Heard you was out on the road these days."

  "Got to be," Slippery said. "Got's to play where my face ain't my callin' card."