Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 14 (4 page)

We had a long and tangled history, Bill Drury and me. He had saved my life, back in pickpocket detail days, in a Shootout at Lincoln and Addison with a car thief named Thomas Downey, who’d been eluding the cops for weeks. For that Bill had won the Lambert Tree commendation—the department’s “Medal of Honor” for bravery in the line of duty; he also won my undying friendship.

In 1943, when an old girl friend of mine, Estelle Carey, was murdered viciously—tortured and torched—Drury doggedly pursued the Syndicate angles of the slaying. He turned up the heat on various hoods, subjecting them to polygraphs, and this led to trumped-up charges that Drury—then acting captain at Town Hall station—had looked the other way where gambling in his district was concerned. Bill and his friend Tim O’Conner—another rare Chicago cop with an honest reputation—were suspended, though both fought through the courts and were eventually reinstated.

I had also been involved in the case that had finally brought him down: the shooting of James Ragen, who had been rubbed out when he refused to turn his racing news wire service over to the Outfit. Ragen had been my client—I’d been his bodyguard driving down State Street in the heart of Bronzeville when the shotgun assassins opened up on us from a truck otherwise filled with orange crates. The bullets didn’t kill Jim, not immediately; but he died in the hospital, with the help of a mobbed-up doctor who introduced infectious staphylococci into the wounds.

Jim Ragen’s niece, by the way, was Peggy Hogan; and Peggy had been my girl friend at the time (right now she was my ex-wife).

So I had helped Bill track down a trio of colored eyewitnesses to the shotgunning—a Pullman porter, a steel worker, and a drugstore clerk—and three West Side gun men were indicted for the Ragen killing. But one of the witnesses was bumped off, and the other two recanted…and both claimed Drury had offered to share the reward money with them in exchange for their testimony. Bill and his partner Tim O’Conner were called before a grand jury demanding details on their dealings with the two witnesses; when they refused to testify unless granted immunity, the Civil Service Board dismissed both from the force.

Now, as his court battles continued, and his chance of returning to the Chicago P.D. grew ever more remote, Bill Drury was staging a last ditch effort to bring down the Outfit guys who had derailed his career.

“I trusted you, Bill,” I said, still seated on the crate, sighing, shaking my head. “And you’ve put me on the spot.”

Sitting before his feast of tape recorders and guns, he didn’t look at all contrite. He smiled like Father O’Malley and held out his open hands. “Nate…join me.”

“What? Go to hell.”

Now, ridiculously, he looked around as if to make sure no one was eavesdropping; and very quietly he said, “I’m not just investigating, and helping out the committee…. I’m testifying.”

“You’re going on TV?”

He ducked that. “You know about my files, my notebooks, my journals.”

I nodded. Over the years he’d made a hobby of it, following day-by-day movements of Outfit leaders, compiling names, dates, places, which had been useful when he’d turned to writing those newspaper columns. Few people understood the inner workings of the Chicago mob better than Drury; and no one else had chronicled them in this fashion.

“Well,” he said, basking in self-satisfaction, “next Tuesday I’m meeting with Kefauver’s staff. I’m turning over all my notebooks, records, card files, tape recordings, everything.”

I couldn’t stop shaking my head. “Why not just limit it to that, behind closed doors—why advertise it by testifying?”

He sneered. “I’m not afraid of these dago bastards. I don’t operate in the backroom—I’m taking this out in the open!”

Which was why he was sitting in a basement, I supposed, making illegal wiretap tapes.

“Don’t go pious on me, you dumb mick,” I said. “You figure if you can’t wangle your way back on the department, at least you’ll be famous. Maybe write a book—maybe open your own detective agency.”

He had the expression of a lovesick fool proposing to his girl. “I’d rather stay on at the A-1 with you, Nate. We could make that place something special.”

“Yeah—a parking lot.”

“Nate. You have to do this.”

“Do what?”

“Join me. Come with me, Tuesday. Meet with Kefauver’s people. Agree to testify.”

I stood and almost bumped my head on the rafters. “Testify! What, are you smoking the evidence?”

He placed his hands on the table; the recorder continued to whir. “Nate. Look—you’re the only guy in this city
not
mobbed-up who knows the mob like I do…. Fact, you know things I don’t. You worked for them. You were practically Frank Nitti’s goddamn protege.”

That was overstating it: I had done jobs for Nitti, and he had done me favors, like not having me whacked. We had come to respect each other—maybe we’d even grown to like each other. I’d even been sorry to see him die.

But all I said was, “Nitti was the best man in his world—that’s all that can be asked of anybody.”

His eyes widened and rolled. “Bullshit, Heller! He was a killer and a thug and a goddamned extortionist and…hell, you know that, you know damn well you should join me and help cleanse this city.”

Now my eyes widened. “Did you say that? Did you really say that? ‘Cleanse this city?’ Can Bill Drury be that naive? That stupid?”

He folded his arms. “I’m not stupid and I’m not naive. And while I don’t share your admiration for Frank Nitti, I do admit he was a damn sight better than the boys upstairs.”

And he jerked a thumb at the ceiling, where fifteen floors above, the Fischettis’ three-story penthouse began.

I wasn’t really following this, and said so: “What makes the Fischettis so special, all of a sudden?”

Leaning forward, he shared his secrets, like a swami who had traded his crystal ball in on firearms and tape recorders. “The power is shifting. Guzik’s way down the ladder, now…last of the old guard. Accardo wants to retire, and there’ll be a successor named, soon. And right now, first in line, is Capone’s sweet cousin, Charley—the worst of a sick lot.”

I shrugged. “The worst I ever heard about Charley, and his brother Rocco for that matter, is they’re woman-beaters.”

“That’s an indication of their savagery, sure. Nate, since the war, Charley’s moved the Outfit full-scale into narcotics…which was something Frank Nitti would never have done.”

That was true about Nitti, and I knew narcotics use in town was up, but I said, “I thought Fischetti’s agenda was encouraging the boys to invest in legit enterprises. All I hear from Outfit sources, these days, is Wall Street and Texas oil.”

He smirked. “Oh, yeah, they’re investing in stocks and bonds and petroleum, all right. But they’re also investing in human misery.” He began counting on his fingers, though the numbers he began tossing around didn’t correlate. “There are fifty thousand drug addicts in this city, Nate—about half of them colored, on the South Side. You know what a habit like that takes to maintain? You got to steal over a hundred bucks worth of goods a day. You add it up.”

“Save the speeches for Kefauver.”

But he was rolling. “Did you ever see a schoolkid hooked on heroin? I have. Think about your baby son, Nate…think about him.”

“Maybe you should think about your own family, Bill.”

“You know I don’t have any kids.”

“No—but you got a wife, a beautiful one who loves your foolish ass. And your mother lives with you, right? And your sister? And her husband? And their kid? It’s not just your life, and mine, you’re risking, you know.”

That chin jutted even more than usual. “Annabel knows what we’re up against. She’s been at my side for a long time, Nate, through all my wars…. You know that.”

My turn for a speech. “Here’s what I know, Bill—you can talk about justice, and wave the flag, and play the violin about schoolkid junkies all you want…. But you know and I know that this isn’t about justice. It’s about getting even.”

He started to respond, then stopped.

I went on: “You picked out these Outfit guys for a target, when you were a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked punk kid, looking to make a reputation. Well, you made that rep, and along the way, also made the worst kind of enemies. They didn’t shoot you, oh no—they killed your career instead, because the way this city…hell, this country…works is, the public wants what the Outfit is selling, and so the politicians and the civil servants, like the whores they are, do their part by climbing in bed with the mob guys. You can’t do anything about that, Bill—people like money, and they like sex, and they like all kinds of things that are bad for them, like gambling and booze and dope. This isn’t about any of that, though, is it, Bill? This is about you getting even with the bastards who took your career away from you…and if you deny it, I’m going to stick that illegal sawed-off shotgun up your ass.”

He avoided my gaze, studying the tape recorder whose reels were whirling, gathering more tainted evidence. Finally he said, “They can subpoena you. I’ll tell them that you know plenty.”

“Then I’ll lie through my teeth, and save my ass.”

He gave me a long, withering look. “You did that once before.”

That was a low blow. I knew exactly what he was referring to. When I was a young uniformed cop, I had lied on the witness stand as part of a Capone mob cover-up. My father was an old union guy with a leftist bookstore on the West Side, and I knew if he didn’t get an influx of money, and soon, he’d go under. So I lied on the stand, and got the money, and was promoted to detective, and Pop shot himself through the head with my nine millimeter Browning automatic at his kitchen table in the living quarters back of the bookshop. It was still the gun I carried, when I carried a gun, which I wasn’t right now. That gun was the only conscience I had.

“When it’s safe,” I said, calmly, gesturing to the Revere machines on the scarred table, “haul this stuff out of here. Take the recorders, and any other A-1 property you’ve checked out, back to the office.”

He shrugged, nodded. “All right.”

“And Bill? You’re fired.”

Of course, he knew that already; he said nothing else as I found my way out. I paid the janitor his second fin, and walked around the front of the building. I was going to lay a twenty on the doorman, to make sure he forgot my visit.

I was in the process of giving him the bill when Joey Fischetti came out through the lobby and recognized me.

Grinning, Joey Fischetti—having just exited the elevator—trotted across the narrow, modern lobby of Barry Apartments, with its ferns, mirrors, and luxurious furnishings; his footsteps echoed like gunshots off the marble black-and-white tile floor, the first few making me flinch. About five-eight, slender, darkly tanned and immaculately groomed, Joey wore the kind of “casual” outfit it took half an hour to select from a well-stocked closet: a brown-with-white patterned sports jacket, a blue-on-white tattersall vest, gray slacks, a red-and-blue patterned tie, and a sporty charcoal hat with a fuzzy red feather that looked like a fisherman’s fly.

At forty, Joey was the baby of the Fischetti triumvirate, the only one not actively involved in criminal capitalism, with a blank arrest record to prove it; he was generally considered the best-looking of the brothers (though Charley might have taken issue), and the dumbest (no likely challengers on that point).

The latter quality was what I was counting on.

“Nate Heller!” he said, joining the doorman and myself in the crisp fall afternoon air. He was an animated guy drenched with show biz sincerity. His voice had a husky, high-pitched enthusiasm, and his eyes were as bright as he wasn’t. “Goddamn. Do you believe it? What a coincidence!”

“Isn’t it, though? Good to see you, Joey. Frank sends his best.”

Sinatra and Joey Fischetti were bosom buddies.

He grinned—big glistening white teeth that were either caps or choppers—and shook his head. “You believe that? That’s the second coincidence!”

I still didn’t know what the first coincidence was.

Now his eyes narrowed, in an approximation of thought. “What are you doin’ around these shabby digs, Nate?”

The Barry Apartments were anything but shabby: this was as fashionable as Chicago neighborhoods got, and the Fischetti clan’s luxurious triplex penthouse had once been occupied by Mayor Thompson and Mayor Cermak…one at a time, of course.

I gave him half a smile and said, “I was just bribing your doorman to see if I could come up and see you, without an appointment.”

The doorman’s eyes widened with alarm.

But Joey waved off my remark. “Ah, you don’t need to waste your money on that! Don’t take his money, George.”

George swallowed and said, “No, sir,” and handed the twenty back.

As I was returning the bill to my pocket, Joey slipped his arm around my shoulder and walked me a few steps down the sidewalk, for a little privacy; the baby Fischetti smelled like a Vitalis and Old Spice cocktail. “My brother’s been wanting to talk to you.”

“Rocky or Charley?”

“Charley. Rock’ll probably be in on it, though. See, I was supposed to call you, but I got busy making arrangements for Frank. That’s where I was headed, right now—paving the way for the Voice with Dave Halper, at the Chez Paree.”

Dave Halper was one of the new owners of the club, which Mike Fritzel and Joe Jacobsen—the longtime hosts of a venue that had provided first breaks to the likes of Danny Kaye, Betty Hutton, and Danny Thomas—had sold to him last year. The Fischettis had an interest in this, the city’s biggest, biggest-time nitery: they owned the Gold Key Club, the Chez Paree’s backroom casino.

“See, I kind of had to talk Dave into booking Frank,” Joey said.

“Yeah, the kid’s career’s in a tailspin.”

“Naw, Nate, it’s just a bump in the road.”

I wasn’t going to argue the point. “Well, don’t let me keep you, Joey. I’ll be on my way, and you call my office, and we’ll—”

But, oh fuck, now he was walking me back toward the apartment house. “Don’t be silly,” he was saying, squeezing my shoulder. “Seeing Halper can wait. Frank don’t open till Friday. Let’s go up and see Charley.”

George got the door for us—I didn’t tip him—and Joey and I clip-clopped across the lavish lobby.

“Would you do me a favor, Nate?”

“Name it, Joey.”

We stepped into the elevator, which was attended by a blue-uniformed guy with blue five o’clock shadow, a nose with minimal cartilage, cauliflower ears, and a bulge under his arm that wasn’t a tumor.

Joey said to him, “I’m making a stop at Rocky’s floor.”

“Yes, Mr. Fischetti,” the elevator man marble-mouthed.

To me Joey whispered, “Don’t mention to Charley I just run into you by accident. I wanna tell him I called your office and you come around on purpose.”

“Fine by me, Joey.”

“Sometimes Charley thinks I’m a fuck-up, and it’s nice to show him I got organizational abilities. I’m doing more and more in the entertainment field, you know.”

“Are you managing Frank?”

He grinned, shrugged. “Not exclusive. Several people I know got a piece of Frank.”

This did not surprise me. Since the decline of his career, Sinatra had been working mostly in mob rooms—Skinny D’Amato’s 500 Club in Atlantic City; Moe Dalitz’s Desert Inn in Vegas; Ben Madden’s Riviera in New Jersey; and of course the Chez Paree here in Chicago.

At the seventeenth floor, the uniformed thug deposited us in an entryway about the size of my first apartment. The plaster walls were light gray, and the penthouse door—and another around to the left labeled FIRE STAIRS—a deep charcoal. A few furnishings—a table with cut flowers in a white vase under a mirror, a golden Egyptian settee with a scarlet cushion—hugged the walls, and a sunburst clock opposite the penthouse door matched the sunburst doorbell, which Joey didn’t press—he used a key.

“Hey, Rocky,” Joey called, cracking the unlocked door. “It’s me—Joey! Are you decent?”

Now there was a question.

The only response was a muted railroad whistle—
woo! woo!

Joey grinned at my confused expression. He said, like I’d understand, “Sounds like Rocky’s in his own little world again.”

I followed Joey inside. The spacious living room had the same light gray walls and a charcoal slate floor, warmed up by pastel furnishings, including two peach sofas facing each other over a coffee table on a white carpet near a fireplace over which hung a big gilt-framed painting of peasants picnicking in what I’d wager was a Sicilian countryside setting. Past a grand piano, through sheer drapes, I could make out—through the wall of glass doors—the terrace-style balcony with its white wrought iron furniture and millionaire’s lake view.

“Not bad, huh?” Joey said, as I took the place in. Occasional little railroad whistles—“Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo!”—punctuated this nickel tour.

“Nice,” I said, thinking it didn’t look like anybody lived here; an adjacent formal dining room looked similarly showroom perfect. Of course I knew the Fischettis only stayed in Chicago about half the year—must have been about time for them to head down to Florida, where they wintered (and supervised their criminal activities in that state).

The ostentation didn’t surprise me, though—one of Rocco’s nicknames was Money Bags, because he liked to flash his dough around.

Joey led me down a hallway off of which were a spotless white modern kitchen and a bathroom. Finally, he knocked on a door, edged it open, stuck his head in, and said, “Hey, Super Chief! We got company.”

“Yeah, yeah,” a gruff voice said.

I followed Joey in—possibly designed to be a master bedroom, the large room’s only furnishings (other than a few scattered movie-set type canvas-and-wood chairs) were tables of various sizes and various heights, the central one a good four feet by six, to accommodate the towns and villages, the valleys and mountains, the tunnels, bridges, loading platforms and stations, of an enormous, sprawling, demented model railroad.

Miniature freight elevators unloaded grain, water tanks filled the steam engines of locomotives, and a coal mine provided chips of real coal. Tiny conductors, engineers, railroad workers, and passengers inhabited this landscape, as did billboards, farmhouses (with livestock), and much else. On shelves were model trains of every conceivable sort: steam, electric, freight, military, passenger, one of which was on the tracks now, taking the incredibly elaborate journey through the world Rocco Fischetti had created.

The Almighty God of this mini-universe was a homely, pale, pockmarked, shovel-headed hood with a wide yet sharp chin, a long knobby nose, and dark close-set eyes under slashes of black eyebrow; his hair was black with skunk streaks of white. Five-ten, sturdy-looking, he sat mesmerized before a control panel of switches—watching his train take its circuitous, even dangerous, route—wearing a maroon silk house robe and slippers—and a railroad engineer’s cap.

He wasn’t alone: seated across from him, bored senseless, was a cute shapely twentyish blonde (I thought I recognized her from the Chez Paree chorus line) in a silver silk robe and her own engineer’s cap. Also, a black eye.

“Sorry to bother you, Rock,” Joey said.

The train said, “Woo woo! Woo woo!”

Rocco’s back was partly to me—he had not seen me yet, or anyway not acknowledged in any way that he had. “I’m busy,” he said. “Don’t I look busy?”

“You look busy, but I got Nate Heller here with me.”

After a tough day beating up his girl friends, or a hard night torturing an informer, a guy needed to let his hair down. And Rocco had found a way to unwind while expressing his creativity, fashioning this intricate model railroad complex.

He threw a few switches and his train slowed to a halt, its last “woo woo” sounding a little weak, even sad.

He looked at me, and said, “So how’s the dick?”

“Swell,” I said. “And you mean that in a good way, right, Rocky?”

He smirked; we knew each other a little—though I now knew him better, having glimpsed Model Train Land—and we always spoke, even kidded some. He was the kind of guy who expected respect but liked being treated like a regular joe.

“We been wanting to talk to you,” Rocco said, “Charley and me.” Rather resignedly, he plucked the railroad cap from his head and tossed it on the control panel. To his brother, he said, “Go on up and see Charley…I’ll get dressed and join you.”

The girl said, “Should I get dressed, too, Rock? Are we going out for dinner?”

He glared at her. “Did I ask you anything?”

“No.”

The flatness of their voices in the room was almost a surprise: yelling across the mountainous landscape between them, you’d expect an echo.

“Did I fucking ask you anything?”

“No.”

“That’s right. Go on and get dressed. Put something on that eye—it’s ugly.”

“Yes, Rock.”

“And call Augustino’s and get us the regular table.”

“Yes, Rock.”

But she hadn’t moved from her perch. She was waiting, respectfully, for us to leave. I guessed.

Rocco ushered me out of the railroad yard, putting a hand on my arm, giving it a gentle, friendly squeeze. He too smelled of Vitalis and Old Spice, though less potently than Joey, who trailed down the hallway behind us.

“You gotta be tough on these dames,” Rocco said. “Gotta know how to handle ’em.”

“You’ve certainly got a touch.”

He knew I was kidding him, and he liked it. “You’re a card, Heller.”

“Yeah, a joker!” Joey chimed in, grinning, pleased with his wit.

Rocco gave me a look that admitted his baby brother’s idiocy, but fondness was in there, too. And before we left, he patted Joey’s cheek and said, “Ask Charley to wait for me, before you talk business.”

So we were going to talk business. Wasn’t that a delightful notion.

We summoned the elevator and its cauliflower-eared guardian, who delivered us to the eighteenth floor. The entryway was identical to the floor below’s, only this time Joey pressed the sunburst doorbell.

“I don’t ever just bust in on Charley,” Joey said. “He don’t like it.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t bother him,” I said. “We can do this some other time….”

But Joey rang the bell again, and before long, Charley—presumably after checking the peephole—revealed himself in the doorway.

Broad-shouldered, kind of stocky, Charles Fischetti was around fifty, an almost-handsome guy with an oval face, bumpy nose, knife-scarred jaw and small mouth that could flash in a surprisingly mischievous smile. Under black slashes of eyebrow that reminded you he was Rocco’s brother, Charley’s hazel eyes beamed an icy, unblinking intelligence. Charley dyed his gray hair platinum and combed it back in traditional George Raft gangster style; he seemed taller than his brothers, but that was the elevator shoes.

“Sorry to drop in on you, Charley,” Joey said.

No dressing robe for Charley Fischetti: his pin-striped single-breasted Botany 500 was so dark a gray, it looked black; his shirt was a light blue and his tie a slip-stitched gray with dots of red, like precision splashes of blood.

“Joey,” Charley said, in a mellow, mildly scolding baritone, “I told you bring Heller around, but I didn’t say just pop by with him.”

Joey had a panicky look, so I jumped in with, “It’s my fault, Mr. Fischetti.” I didn’t know Charley very well, and couldn’t take the same liberties as with Rocco. “I got the date wrong, but Joey said I might as well come on up, anyway.”

Charley smiled at his forty-year-old baby brother, and patted his cheek, much as middle-brother Rocco had. “You’re a good boy, Joey. I shouldn’ta doubted you.”

I said, “If you have another appointment…”

“I do have somebody coming around…” He checked his watch. “…but that’s not for almost an hour.”

Joey explained that Rocco would be joining us.

“Well that’s fine,” he said to his brother. Then, as he gestured for me to step inside, he said, “And let’s make it ‘Charley’ and ‘Nate.’”

“Thank you, Charley.”

“Hey—any friend of Frank Nitti’s is a friend of mine.”

We had stepped into the living room when I replied: “Frank was a fine man. He was almost a father to me.”

That was overstating it, but I wanted to be welcome in these circles, and of course Nitti had been the successor to their beloved cousin Capone.

“Do you like modernist?” Charley asked. “I like modernist.”

Charley liked modernist, all right. The penthouse had the same layout as Rocco’s, with the same light gray walls and charcoal slate floor, but offset by the turquoise of a biomorphic-shaped sofa, the forest green of a sculpted plywood lounge chair’s webbed upholstery, and the salmon pink throw rug (with black geometric squiggles) on which this stuff sat in front of the out-of-place traditional fireplace, over which a huge metal-framed Picasso lithograph squinted with its various eyes.