MURDER BY THE NUMBERS (Eliot Ness)

by Max Allan Collins

  "Hi, doll," he said.

  She smiled immediately, but didn't take her eyes off her drawing. "What are you doing home, you big lug?"

  "I told you I'd come home and spend some time before the council meeting."

  "I know you did," she said, eyes still on the drawing, the smile tickling her lips. "I just didn't believe you."

  "Hey, I'm an honest public servant. Everybody knows that." He looked over her shoulder. "The women are going to dress like men this year, huh?"

  "Just the top layer," she said. "Still lacy underneath."

  "That's a relief. Want me to go down and make us some drinks?"

  "I'll go down with you," she said, and laid down a final stroke of gray. She cleaned the brush in a small glass of water on the work table next to her and grinned at him, showing perfect tiny white teeth. "There. That ought to please Mr. Bradley."

  Bradley was the big boss at Higbee's department store and Ev had nothing to do with him, really; but she was always saying that.

  She tossed the horn-rims on the work table, rose, stretched, showing off her nice, slender figure, pulling off the blue smock to reveal a simple white blouse and navy slacks. She was damn near as tall as he was. When she was through stretching, she slipped her arms around him and gave him a hug and then a slow, sloppy kiss.

  "Don't go to that damn council meeting," she said, and pouted.

  It made him laugh; she was the kind of strong woman who only pouted for effect, and when she did, it was ridiculous.

  "We'll see."

  "I've got a roast in the oven."

  "You did believe me, when I said I'd come home."

  "Hope springs eternal. Skip the council meeting."

  "Why, is that what you want for your birthday?"

  She grinned; she showed an expanse of pink gum when she did that—not very glamorous, he supposed, but appealing as hell.

  "You remembered," she said.

  He hadn't mentioned, this morning, that her birthday was why he planned to come home before the meeting.

  "Let's go down downstairs, doll—you fix us some drinks. I'll start a fire."

  "You already have, big boy."

  He had called her "doll" almost from the beginning, which she found "corny," though she responded to it in kind.

  They moved down the narrow stairway together, bumping shoulders and hips, and she went to the liquor cart and made Scotch on the rocks for him and a small pitcher of martinis for herself, while he got the fire going. He took off his tie and pitched it into the darkness; she unpinned her hair, let it tumble to her shoulders. They sat and drank and watched the glow of the fire and felt the glow of the fire and said very little, kissing frequently.

  "Shouldn't we have supper?" she asked, glancing toward the kitchen.

  "Dessert first," he said, nuzzling her neck.

  They had dessert on the couch and after they'd got dressed again, he helped her in the kitchen. She had a mussed look that made him want dessert again, but he set the table for supper, anyway.

  They ate in the kitchen. Nothing fancy. His tastes in food were simple—strictly meat and potatoes—and she catered to it. But they often ate in restaurants, particularly if she was working in the studio at Higbee's as opposed to at home. After the meal, she served him apple pie a la mode.

  "Two desserts," he said, savoring a bite. "I'll get fat."

  "If you want a third dessert, we can go back in front of the fireplace."

  "You might get fat."

  She smiled warmly. "I might like that."

  He touched her hand. "I'd love it. I want children with you."

  She gave him an arch look. "Are you proposing?"

  They'd never really talked about it, directly.

  He shrugged, smiled enigmatically, and finished his pie. Then he rose, walked to the closet by the front door and got the small package out of his topcoat pocket.

  She was still finishing her slice of pie. She looked up at him, as she licked an ice-cream mustache away, and her eyes got wide as she saw the small pink-wrapped, silver-ribboned package and knew at once what it was.

  She opened the little package greedily and looked at the less-than-breathtaking diamond ring as if it were more than breathtaking. She slipped the ring on and held her hand out and looked at it.

  "Eliot—it's lovely! Lovely. How could you afford . . . ?"

  "It's not exactly the Hope diamond, doll."

  In truth, the manager of a jewelry store he'd helped out last year in the labor extortion inquiry had given him a hell of a price break.

  She stood and hugged him and kissed him, a cold ice-cream kiss, but ice-cream sweet, too. He slipped his arm around her and they walked back into the living room and sat on the couch before the smoldering fire, feet up on a divan.

  "Eliot ... do we dare do this?"

  "Sure—but we ought to keep it to ourselves."

  "Like, I shouldn't wear this ring?"

  "Well, not to Higbee's . . . it'd just get in the way, wouldn't it? You work with your hands, after all. . . ."

  "Your reporter pals are going to know."

  "They won't say anything."

  "When can we ... go public?"

  "After the mayoral election. I owe that to Mayor Burton."

  "That's November . . . almost a year ..."

  "I know. I'm sorry."

  She sighed, but nodded; she looked at her ring wistfully. "You owe that much to Burton."

  "This'll be his last mayoral campaign."

  "Oh?"

  "Keep it under your hat, but greater political prospects are around the corner for him."

  "Governor? Senator? What?"

  "Something like that."

  She intertwined her legs with his. "This town'll be needing a mayor, you know."

  "I suppose that's true."

  "Nobody could beat you."

  "Me? I'm no goddamn politician."

  "Well. Nobody could beat you."

  "Don't be silly."

  "Think about it."

  "I hate politics like poison."

  "Then prove it. Skip the council meeting tonight."

  "I shouldn't."

  "You owe me, buster. You invite me to move in with you, turn this stone castle into our little love nest, and then you stay out all night all the time,"

  He had, in fact, been out all night several nights a week for over two months now.

  He shrugged. "It's the nature of this current case."

  "How do I know you're not shacking up with some floozy at the Hollenden?"

  She was well aware that he had set up a second, temporary office in a suite at the Hollenden Hotel, where he was interviewing witnesses for the numbers racket investigation, often at night.

  He shrugged good-naturedly. "Why don't you hire a detective to follow me?"

  "What, some private eye like your friend Heller, back in Chicago? I wouldn't trust him with change for a dollar."

  "Then I guess you'll just have to trust me."

  "What the hell kind of questioning are you doing in the middle of the night?"

  "Well ... I really can't say."

  "Oh for Christsake, Eliot—who am I going to tell? You trust me, and I'll trust you, okay?"

  He smiled. "Okay. We have to protect the identity of our witnesses. So we pick them up in the middle of the night—if anyone's around, we pretend to be arresting 'em."

  "These are all Negroes? Numbers racketeers?"

  "For the most part. In some cases, we do arrest them, when we have somebody who we think would make a good witness, but who needs some convincing."

  "What kind of convincing? Third-degree convincing, you mean?"

  "No. That's not my style. We explain our strategy, which is to get such a large number of witnesses that no single individual can be blamed by the bad guys for any indictments that come down. We preach safety in numbers."

  "So you escort these witnesses to a room in the Hollenden."

  "Yes—alley entrance, up the service elevator. We
spend a lot of time giving them reassurances that they'll have protection from reprisals."

  "And this works?"

  "We have going on fifty witnesses, at this point."

  She whistled. "That's not bad—safety in numbers, all right."

  There was a knock at the door. An insistent knock.

  He looked over his shoulder toward the sound, suspiciously. He didn't get many people knocking at his door out here—anybody who didn't live in the subdivision would have to get by the guard at the gate, and the guard would've called ahead in such a case.

  "Probably a neighbor," she said, sensing the questions he was asking himself. "Somebody needs a cup of sugar or something."

  The knocking continued, obnoxiously.

  "I don't think so," he said. He got up, tucked in his pants, and got a gun from the top drawer of a small desk near the front window, where he took a moment to gently part the curtains and peek out.

  "It's a man," Ness said, almost whispering, "but from this angle, in the dark, can't make him out."

  She was still on the couch. She said, softly but audibly, "Is that gun really necessary?"

  "I hope not."

  He went to the front door and stood to one side of it and called out, "Who is it?"

  "Answer the goddamn door, Eliot!"

  Sam Wild.

  He opened the goddamn door. The cold hit him like a bucket of water. The reporter, his tan gabardine trenchcoat belted tight, his snap brim felt hat pulled down over his eyes, hands in fur-lined leather gloves, nonetheless looked colder than hell. His breath was fog.

  "Temperature dropped," Ness noted.

  "Let me in, damnit! Freezing my nuts off, pardon my French."

  Ness made a sweeping gesture for him to enter and Wild stepped in, shutting the door himself, then said, "Nice and toasty in here."

  Ness said, sotto voce, "It's Ev's birthday, Sam. We're celebrating. This sure as hell better be important."

  "It's important, all right. Your own people have been trying to call you for over an hour."

  "What do you mean, trying?"

  Ev's voice came from just behind him; she had snuck up on the great detective. "I'm afraid I took the phone off the hook," she admitted. "Right before dinner."

  He turned and looked at her sharply.

  She winced.

  He sighed and worked to soften his look and, with a tense smile, said, "Please don't ever do that."

  "I'm sorry," she said. She obviously meant it, but her feelings were hurt. She slipped back into the living room. He turned back to Wild.

  "So?" he said, irritated.

  "You ever hear of a cop named Willis? Clifford Willis?"

  "No."

  "He's a white cop working the Negro district. Or he was."

  "Was?"

  "He got shot tonight."

  "Oh, Christ. Where?"

  "If you're talking anatomy, he got shot a lot of places. If you're talking geography, the body turned up in the front yard of a house on Hawthorne."

  "Christ! That's just a block off Central. . . ."

  "Yes. A very lively colored neighborhood. And a very dead white cop. Your boys are at the scene right now. I volunteered to come fetch you."

  Ness nodded. "What's the exact address?"

  "5718 Hawthorne."

  "Okay. Thanks, Sam. You go on. I'll be along in my own car, in a minute."

  Wild nodded, said, "Sorry I busted in on your, uh, celebration."

  "Don't give it a thought. See you at the scene."

  Wild nodded again and went out.

  Ness went into the living room, where Ev was sitting quietly, even morosely, staring at the dwindling fire.

  He stood before her. "You want me to throw a few logs on before I go?"

  He didn't wait for her to answer, just went ahead and did it. Got the fire going again, strong; it blazed, casting an orange glow on them.

  She looked up at him yearningly. "Must you go?"

  He put the iron poker back and sat down next to her. "Cop killing in the colored district."

  "I understand," she said. And she did. There was nothing whiney about it; disappointment, yes—but not resentment.

  He sat with her for a moment. "I didn't mean to snap at you."

  "I shouldn't have taken the phone off the hook."

  He said nothing.

  "I just wanted to spend one damn evening with you. Is that a crime?" Here was some resentment. But no bitterness, at least.

  "It's not a crime," he said. "It is a crime, leaving you alone on your birthday, though. Tell you what."

  "What?"

  "Make you a deal. I won't hold it against you, for the phone, if you don't hold it against me, for going."

  She smiled wickedly. "Maybe I want you to hold it against me."

  "Hold what against you? Oh. That. Listen, doll, I gotta go. . ."

  "This minute?"

  "This minute."

  He stood.

  She looked beautiful, hair around her shoulders, clothes in vague disarray. "Can I wait up for you?"

  "Sure. I'll try not to be long. Keep the fire going, why don't you? But if you do go up to bed, I'll wake you when I get home."

  "You better."

  He found his tie and put it on and the shoulder holster, too, though he left the gun behind. He was putting on his topcoat when she called to him from the living room.

  "Eliot! Thank you. Thank you for the diamond."

  "You're welcome, doll. Don't let the fire go out."

  "I won't," she said, "if you won't."

  CHAPTER 11

  Albert Curry stood looking down at the corpse, wishing it could talk.

  Nervously, the cold knifing through his topcoat, he checked his watch. It was approaching nine o'clock and this slightly seedy residential neighborhood, trapped behind a wall of factories, a block north of Central off 55th, was quiet as a funeral. Quieter. Traffic was nonexistent. There were no curbside gawkers, just occasional white eyes in dark windows—not many lights on, for this time of evening. Only a few of the streetlamps were working. If it hadn't been for half a moon up in a clear, starry sky, the street would have been darker than its residents.

  The paint-peeling buildings on this narrow street were for the most part your typical wide-front-porch Cleveland duplexes, run-down versions of the one he'd grown up in, and his parents still lived in, on the far east side.

  On the sidewalk inside the wire fence of a small front yard filled with well-tended bushes, Toussaint Johnson stood talking to the colored couple who lived in one of the exceptions on this street: a small, neat single-family dwelling. The body had been found in their front yard, or anyway the slice of it between the front sidewalk and the wire fence. They had put frayed winter coats on over their pajamas and the man had an arm around the shoulder of his wife, who leaned into him, shivering with the cold, among other things. The husband had called in the discovery.

  Curry, whose pencil and notepad were in hand, noticed that Johnson wasn't taking any field notes. That broke a fundamental rule of crime-scene technique; but Curry knew very well by now that Johnson was not a by-the-book cop. A good cop, possibly even a great cop. But not a by-the-book one.

  In this instance, Curry couldn't blame him. Taking notes would only make the husband and wife ill at ease; and the benefit of having a colored cop questioning colored witnesses might well be lost.

  Curry had already used ropes looped through iron stakes to fence off the corpse; he did this at the left and right, at the approximate property line, and the wire fence and the stakes with ropes made a three-sided wall. Only the street side itself was unenclosed. Using the two-way radio in his unmarked car, he had called the Detective Bureau and asked if Sergeant Merlo was on duty—which, thankfully, he was—and Merlo, who said he would call the coroner himself, should be arriving any minute now.

  Curry had also called over to the Third Precinct for more uniformed men, to help preserve the crime scene, but they hadn't gotten here yet. The two uniform
ed cops who had got to the scene first were standing in the street; they had high-way flares lit, burning orangely in the night, helping keep this deserted street deserted.

  Curry and Johnson had been on the east side that evening, as usual, rounding up numbers-racket witnesses, when they heard the call come in over the police radio. They had tried to reach Ness, and had no luck; Curry stopped at a pay phone and tried the press room at City Hall, which was across from the safety director's office, figuring Sam Wild would be there. He was, but didn't know where Ness was; Wild asked Curry what the hell was going on, off-the-record, and Curry told him. Wild said he'd do his best to round Ness up, and that had been half an hour ago. No sign of either of them.

  On the porch Johnson was shaking hands with the husband, and the wife was smiling a little, timidly, but smiling. They went back in their house and Johnson came down from the porch. He didn't go out the front gate. He walked over to one side of the yard, between some bushes, hopped the wire fence, and walked around on the other side of the staked-off area. He stood in the street as near as he could to Curry and the corpse without getting on the grass.

  All of which went to show. Curry noted, that Johnson knew something about crime-scene preservation, when he felt like it.

  "How long this joker been dead?"

  "Not very," Curry said. "Jaw's still loose. No rigor yet. He's relatively warm."

  "How many holes he got in him?"

  "That I can see, half a dozen."

  The corpse of the white man, who had been wearing a brown suit and no tie, was face-up, sprawled. The bullet wounds were in his chest and stomach—fairly small entry wounds, with scorches on the suit indicating he was shot close up.

  "Wanna turn him over?" Johnson asked. "Maybe there's a weapon under him."

  "We're no homicide dicks," Curry said. "Let's wait for the experts."

  Johnson nodded, and Curry carefully moved away from the corpse, out into the street.

  Sirens announced two squad cars of uniforms from the Third, and the spiffy new red-and-blue cars—part of the recently motorized department. Ness's highly publicized "police force on wheels"—screeched up and officers piled out like a well-organized version of the Keystone Kops. Several of them checked in with Curry and Johnson, speaking to Johnson, whom they knew, as he normally worked out of their precinct.