So were Lana and Miller.
"Buy you a cup of coffee?" I said, rising a little. I was a plainclothes officer, working the pickpocket detail, bucking for detective status. These guys were the best-paid detectives in town, sergeants yet, and they maybe didn't deserve respect, exactly, but I knew enough to give them some.
They made no move to sit down. Lang just stood there, hands in his topcoat pockets, snow brushing his shoulders like dandruff, and rocked on his heels, like a hobbyhorse; but whether it was from nerves, or from boredom, I couldn't say: I could just sense there was something I wasn't being let in on. Miller stood planted there like one of the lions in front of the Art Institute, only meaner-looking. Also, the lions were bronze and he was tarnished copper.
Then Miller spoke.
"We need a third" he said. He had a voice like somebody trying to sound tough in a talkie: monotone and slightly off-pitch. It should've been funny. It wasn't.
"A third what?" I said.
"A third man," Lang chimed in. "A third player."
"What's the same?"
"We'll tell you in the car."
They both turned toward the door. I was supposed to follow- them, apparently. I grabbed my topcoat and hat.
The speak was on the corner of Clark and Polk. Out on the street the wind was whipping at package-clutching pedestrians heading for Dearborn Station, which was around the comer and a block down, where I should be getting back to, to protect these shoppers from losing whatever dough they had left after Marshall Field's got through with them. Skirts and overcoats flapped, and everybody walked with heads lowered, watching the pavement, ignoring the occasional panhandler; dry, wind-scattered snow was like confetti being tossed out of the windows during a particularly uninspiring parade. Across the way the R.E.A. Station was busy, trucks pulling in and out, others being loaded up. Four women, pretty, in their late twenties, early thirties, bundled with packages, went giggling into the speak we'd just exited.
It was a week to Christmas, and business was picking up for everybody. Except for Saint Peter's Church-maybe, which was cattycorner from where we stood; business there looked slow.
There was no parking in and near the Loop (which was loosely defined as the area within the El tracks), but Lang and Miller had left their black Buick by the curb anyway, half a block down, across the street; it was the model people called the Pregnant Guppy, because the sides bulged out over the running boards. The running board next to the curb had a foot on it: a uniformed cop was writing a ticket. Miller walked up and reached over and tore it off the cop's pad and wadded it up and tossed it to the snow-flecked breeze. He didn't have to show the cop his detective's shield. Every copper in town knew the two Harrys,
But I liked the way the uniformed man handled it, a Paddy of about fifty who'd been pounding the beat longer than these two had been picking up the mayor's graft, that was for sure. And clean, as Chicago cops went, or he wouldn't still be pounding it. He put his book and pencil away slowly and gave Miller a look that was part condescension, part contempt, said, "My mistake, lad," and cleared his throat and shot phlegm toward Lang's feet. And turned on his heel and left, swinging his nightstick.
Lang, who'd had to hop back, and Miller, his face hanging like a loose rubber mask, stood watching him walk away, wondering what they should do about such unbridled arrogance, when I tapped Lang on the shoulder and said, "I'm freezing my nuts off, gentlemen. What exactly is the party'?"
Miller smiled. It was wide but it didn't turn up at the corners and the teeth were big and yellow, like enormous kernels of corn. It was the worst goddamn smile I ever saw.
"Frank Nitti's tossing it," he said.
"Only he don't know it," Lang added, and opened the door on the Buick. "Get in back."
I climbed in. The Pregnant Guppy wasn't a popular model, but it was a nice car. Brown mohair seats, varnished wood trim around the windows. Comfortable, too, considering the situation.
Miller got behind the wheel. The Buick turned over right away, despite the cold, though it shuddered a bit as we pulled out into light traffic. Lang turned and leaned over the seat and smiled. "You got a gun with you?"
I nodded.
He passed a small.38, a snubnose, back to me.
"Now you got two," he said.
We were heading north on Dearborn. We drove through Printer's Row, its imposing ornate facades rising to either side of me, aloof to my situation. One of them, tall, gray, half-a-block long, was the Transportation Building, where my friend Eliot Ness was working even now; he seemed a more likely candidate to be calling on Al Capone's heir than yours truly.
"How'd you finally nail Nitti?" I asked after a while.
Lang turned and looked at me, surprised, like he'd forgotten I was there.
"What do you mean?
"What's the charge? Who'd he kill?"
Lang and Miller exchanged glances, and Lang made a sound that was vaguely a laugh, though you could mistake it for a cough.
Miller, in his monotone, said. "That's a good one."
For a second, just a second, despite the gun I'd been handed. I had the feeling I was being taken for a ride. That somehow I'd stepped on somebody's toes and whoever it was was big enough and hurt bad enough to take it on up to the mayor, who Christ knows owed plenty of people favors, and now His Honor's prize flunkies were driving me God knows where- Lake Michigan maybe, where a lot of people went swimming, only some of them had been holding their breath underwater for years now.
But they didn't turn right, toward the lake; they turned left at the Federal Building- which meant the Chicago River was still a possibility and the Union League Club ignored us as we passed. We turned again, right this time, at the Board of Trade. We were in the concrete canyons of the financial district now- and by concrete canyons, I mean just that: in the thick of Chicago's loop, you can see towering buildings at left and right and front and back. Chicago invented the skyscraper and never lets you forget it.
The dustlike snow wasn't coming down hard enough to collect, so the city remained gray, though touched with Christmas red and green: most office windows bore poinsettias, and every utility pole had sprigs of holly or balsam: and now and then an ex-broker in what used to be a nice suit sold bright red apples at a nickel per. Just a few blocks over, on State Street, it would've looked a little more like Christmas, albeit a drunken one: the big stores with their fancy window displays were high on drinking paraphernalia this year, cocktail shakers, hip flasks, hollow canes, home-brew apparatus. All of it legal, but a violation of the law's spirit, as if hookahs were being publicly sold and displayed, just because public opinion suddenly sanctioned smoking dope.
We passed the Bismarck Hotel, where the mayor often lunched; it hadn't been so long ago that the famous old hotel had changed its name to the Randolph, after its location on the southeast corner of Randolph and Wells, to assuage anti-German sentiments during the Great War, though nobody had ever called it the Randolph, and a couple years back the name went back to Bismarck, officially. We were on the Palace Theater side, where Ben Bernie and his Lads had top billing ("Free Gifts for the Kids!") and the picture was Sports Parade with William Gargan; across the street was City Hall, its Corinthian columns and classical airs making an ironic facade for the goings-on within. Then we crossed under the El, a train rumbling overhead, and I decided they were kidding about Frank Nitti, because the Detective Bureau was on our left and we'd obviously been heading there all along- only we went past.
In the 200 block of North LaSalle, City Hall just a block back, the Detective Bureau less than that. Miller pulled over to the curb again, NO PARKING be damned, and he and Lang got out slowly and I followed them. They drifted casually toward the Wacker-LaSalle Building, a whitestone skyscraper on the corner, the Chicago River across the street from it. A barge was making impatient noises at the nearby example of the massive drawbridges Big Bill Thompson gave the city, but its iron shoulders didn't even shrug.
Inside the Wacker-LaSalle, a g
ray-speckled marble floor stretched out across a large, mostly empty lobby, turning our footsteps into radio sound effects. On the ceiling high above, cupids flew halfheartedly. There was a newsstand over at the left; a row of phone booths at the right; a bank of elevators straight ahead.
Halfway to the elevators, more or less, in the midst of the big lobby, a couple of guys in derbies and brown baggy suits were sitting in cane-back chairs with a card table set up between them, playing gin. They were a Laurel and Hardy pair, only Italian, and Laurel had the mustache; both had cigars, as well as bulges under one arm. We were a stone's throw from the financial district, but these guys weren't brokers.
Hardy glanced up at the two Harrys, recognizing them, nodding; Laurel looked at his cards. I looked ahead at the building registry, in the midst of the elevators with their polished brass cage doors: white letters on black, coming into focus as we neared. Import/export, other assorted small businesses, a few lawyers.
We paused at the elevators while Miller cleaned his thick wire-frames again. When they were back on his head, he nodded and Lang hit the elevator button.
"I'll take Campagna," Miller said. It sounded like he was ordering drinks.
"What?" I said.
They didn't say anything; they just looked at the elevators, waiting.
" 'Little New York' Campagna?" I said. "The torpedo?"
An elevator came; a guy in another brown suit with matching underarm bulge was running it.
Lang put a finger on his lips to shush me. We got on the elevator and the guy told us to stand back. We did, and not just because he was armed: in those days when you were told to stand back on an elevator, you listened- there were no safety doors inside, and if you stood too near the front and took a shove, you could lose an arm.
He brought us up to the fifth floor: nobody was posted up here; no comedians with guns playing cards. Nobody at all with a bulge under his arm. Just gray walls and offices with pebbled glass in the doors with numbers and, sometimes, names. We were standing on a field of tiny black-and-white tiles- looking down the hallway at the receding mosaic of them made me dizzy momentarily. The air had an antiseptic smell, like a dentist's office, or a toilet.
Lang looked at Miller and pointed back to himself. "Nitti," he said.
"Hey," I said. "What the hell's going on?"
They looked at me like I was an intruder; like they didn't remember asking me along.
"Get a gun out, Red," Lang said to me impatiently.
"It's Heller, if you don't mind," I said, but did what he said, as he did likewise. As did Miller.
"We got a warrant?" I said.
"Shut up." Miller said, without looking at me.
"What the hell am I supposed to do?" I said.
"I just told you." Miller said, and this time he did look at me. "Shut up."
The blank eyes behind the Coke-bottle glasses were round black balls; funny how eyes so inexpressive could say so much.
Lang interceded. "Back us up. Heller. There may be some shooting."
They walked. Their footsteps- and mine, following- echoed down the hall like hollow words.
They stopped at a door that had no name on its pebbled glass- just a number. 554.
It wasn't locked.
Miller went in first, a.45 revolver in his fist; Lang followed, with a.38 with a four-inch barrel. I brought up the rear, thoroughly confused, but leaving the snubnose Lang gave me in my topcoat pocket: I carried a nine-millimeter automatic, a Browning- unusual for a cop, since automatics can jam on you, but I liked automatics. As much as I could like any gun, that is.
It was an outer office; a desk faced us as we entered, but there was no secretary or receptionist behind it-There were, however, two guys in two of half a dozen chairs lining the left wall two more brown suits, topcoats in their laps, sitting there like some more furniture in the room.
Both were in their late twenties, dark hair, pale blank faces, average builds. One of them, with an oft-broken nose, was reading a pulp magazine, Black Mask; the other, with pockmarks you could hide dimes in, was sitting smoking, a deck of Phillip Morris and a much-used ashtray on the seat of the chair next to him.
Neither went for a gun or otherwise made any move. They just sat there surprised- not at seeing cops, but at seeing cops with guns in their hands.
In the corner to the left of the door we'd just come in was a coatrack with four topcoats and three hats; the right wall had another half dozen chairs, empty. Just behind and to the left of the desk was a water cooler and, in the midst of the pebbled-glass-and-wood wall, a closed door.
Then it opened.
Standing in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, was a man who was unmistakably Frank Nitti. I'd never met him, though he'd been pointed out to me a few times: but once having seen him, you couldn't miss him: handsome, in a battered way, fighter's nose, thin inverted-V mustache, faint scar on his lower lip: impeccably groomed, former barber that he was, slick black hair parted neatly at the left; impeccably dressed, in a gray pinstripe suit with vest, and wide black tie with a gray-and-white pattern. He was smaller than Frank Nitti was supposed to be, but he was an imposing figure just the same.
He closed the door behind him.
There was a look on his face, upon seeing the two Harrys, that reminded me of the look on that uniformed cop's face. He seemed irritated and bored with them, and the fact that guns were in their hands didn't seem to concern him in the least.
A raid was an annoyance; it meant getting booked, making bail, then business as usual. But a few token raids now and then were necessary for public relations. Only for Nitti to be involved was an indignity. He'd only been out of Leavenworth a few months, since serving a tax rap; and now he was acting as his cousin Capone's proxy, the Big Fellow having left for the Atlanta big house in May.
"Where's Campagna?" Lang said. He was standing with Miller in front of him. partially blocked by him. Like Miller was a rock he was hiding behind.
"Is he in town?" Nitti said. Flatly.
"We heard you were siccing him on Tony," Miller said.
Tony was the mayor: Anton J. Cermak. alias "Ten Percent Tony."
Nitti shrugged. "I heard your bohunk boss is sleeping with Newberry," he said.
Ted Newberry was a Capone competitor on the North Side, running what was left of the old "Bugs" Moran operation.
Silence hung in the room like the smell of wet paint.
Then Lang said to me, "Frisk the help."
The two hoods stood; I patted them down with one hand. They were unarmed. If this was a handbook and wire-room setup, as I suspected, their being unarmed made sense; they were serving as runners, not guns. Lang and Miller taking their time about getting into the next room also made sense: most raids were conducted only for show, and this was giving the boys inside time to destroy the evidence.
"Let's see if Campagna's in there." Lang said finally, nodding toward the closed door.
"Who?" Nitti said, with a faint smile.
Then he opened the door and went in, followed by his runners, then by Miller, Lang, and me.
The inner room was larger, but nothing elaborate: just a room with a table running from left to right, taking up a lot of the space. At right, against the wall, was a cage, and a guy in shirt sleeves wearing a green accountant's shade was sitting in there with a bunch of money on the counter; he hadn't bothered putting it away. Perhaps it wouldn't all fit in the drawer. At left a young guy stood at a wire machine with a ticker tape in his hand, only this wasn't the Board of Trade by a long shot. Two more sat at the table: another one in shirt sleeves, his back to us, suitcoat slung over the chair behind him, four phones on the table in front of him; and across from him, a hook-nosed hood wearing a pearl hat with a black band at a Capone tilt. There were no pads or paper of any kind on the table, though there were a few scattered pens and pencils. This was a wireroom, all right. The smoking wastebasket next to the table agreed with me.
The guy in shirt sleeves at the table was the
only one I recognized: Joe Palumbo. He was a heavyset man with bulging eyes and a vein-shot nose; at about forty-five, the oldest man in the room with the exception of Nitti, who was pushing fifty gracefully. The hood in the Capone hat was about thirty-five, small, swarthy, smoking- and probably Little New York Campagna. The accountant in the cage was in his thirties, too; and the kid at the ticker tape, with curly dark hair and a mustache, couldn't have been twenty-five. Lang ordered the accountant out of the cage; he was a little man with round shoulders and he took a seat at the table, across from Palumbo, next to the man I assumed (rightly) to be Campagna, who looked at the two Harrys and me with cold dark eyes that might have been glass. Miller told the runners to take seats at the table; they did. Then he had the others stand and take a frisk, Campagna first. Clean.
"What's this about?" Nitti asked. He was standing near the head of the table.
Lang and Miller exchanged glances; it seemed to mean something.
My hand was sweating around the automatic's grip. The men at the table weren't doing anything suspicious; their hands were on the table, near the phones. Everyone had been properly searched. Everyone except Nitti, that is, though the coat and vest hung on him in such a way that a shoulder holster seemed out of the question.
He was just standing there, staring at Lang and Miller, and I could feel it starting to work on them. Campagna's gaze was no picnic, either. The room seemed warm, suddenly; a radiator was hissing- or was that Nitti?
Finally Lang said "Heller?"
"Yes?" I said. My voice broke, like a kid's.
"Frisk Nitti. Do it out in the other room."
I stepped forward and, gun in hand but not threateningly, asked Nitti to come with me.
He shrugged again and came along; he seemed to be having trouble deciding just how irritated to be.
In the outer office he held his coat open as if showing off the lining- it was jade-green silk- and I patted him down. No gun.
The cuffs were in my topcoat. Nitti turned his back to me and held his wrists behind him while I fished for the cuffs. He glanced back and said. "Do you know what this is about, kid?"
True Detective Page 2