The Million-Dollar Wound (11 page)

“Yes, yes,” O’Hare said, irritably.

“What’s he doing working for you? Better still, what’s he doing alive?”

“Les’s a good man,” O’Hare said, as if that explained it.

“Capone’s getting out in a few days,” I said. After seven years and some months. “He and Les’ll have a lot to talk about. Old times and all.”

“Capone’s sick.”

“So I hear,” I said. “Syphilis. The papers say the docs gave ’im malaria, to induce a fever. Some cure.”

We were in Cicero, now, having passed out of a thumb of Stickney that stuck into Cicero’s pie; this was a working-class neighborhood of single-family dwellings, an occasional two-flat, mostly wood-frame structures.

“Never mind that,” he said, looking nervously behind him. “We don’t have all that much time.”

“For what?”

“For me to tell you why I hired you.”

“Oh. Somehow I figured it didn’t really have much to do with picking pockets. But why the elaborate show in front of your secretary and everybody?”

We were passing by a nice little park, now. O’Hare turned right onto Ogden, which was a well-traveled four-lane thoroughfare, a diagonal street, making each major intersection a three-way one. For now, the railroad yard was on our left, more frame dwellings on our right. And lots of neighborhood bars. This was Cicero, after all.

“I don’t know who I can trust,” he explained. “Every person in my life, with the exception of my kids, is tainted by those hoodlums. Even my fiancée.”

“Who’s your fiancée?”

Vaguely sad, he said, “Sue Granata.”

I’d seen her before; a beautiful young woman with dark blond hair and a brother who was a mob-owned state representative.

I said, “And you figure you can trust me?”

“You have that reputation. Also, we have a mutual friend.”

“Besides Frank Nitti, you mean?”

“Besides Frank Nitti.”

“Who, then?”

He looked back over his shoulder. Then he said, flatly, “Eliot Ness.”

“How do you know Eliot?”

“I was his inside man with the Outfit.”

I felt my jaw drop. “What?”

O’Hare had a faint, sneering smile. He was gripping the wheel like it was somebody’s neck. “I’ve always detested the hoodlums I’ve been forced to deal with. Their loud dress, their bad grammar, their uncouth manners.”

“Yeah, their grammar’s always been one of my chief complaints against ’em.”

“This is hardly amusing, Mr. Heller.”

“What happened to ‘Nate’?”

“Nate, then. All I ask is that you ride along with me, into the city, and listen to what I have to say.”

“I’ll listen, but I don’t appreciate being brought out to your track on false pretenses.”

He shook his head, the firm little chin contrasting with the quivering flab it rested on. “The security work for which I’ve retained you is legitimate. But I have a second job for you—a matter that must stay between just the two of us.”

“I’m listening.”

“Some years ago, I was a conduit of information for your friend Mr. Ness, as well as Frank Wilson and Elmer Irey.”

Jesus. That was a laundry list of the federal agents credited with “getting” Capone.

“Then this
is
about Capone getting out,” I said. “You’re nervous he may’ve found out you were an informer.”

“That is a part of it. And I’ve been told as much, that Capone’s been making noise about me in Alcatraz. But I’m valuable to the Outfit, and am as powerful in my way as any of them.” He sighed. “It’s all rather complex. With Capone’s release, various factions within the Outfit will be jockeying for position.”

We were moving up over a tall traffic bridge, over the railroad yard; then we came down into Chicago, into a factory district.

“What do you want of me?” I asked him.

“I haven’t been an…‘informer,’ as you put it…in years. And my racing interests are quite legal, now. But recently federal agents have tried to contact me, left several messages at my office, asking for information about a small-time thief from my St. Louis days. Apparently somebody told them I’d be willing to talk. This comes at a very bad time indeed!”

We were in a residential area now; occasional bars, mom-and-pop groceries.

“With Capone’s return imminent,” I said, “it’s a very bad time to be renewing your federal acquaintance. Say—the recent problems Billy Skidmore and Moe Annenberg have had with the feds could also be laid at your doorstep—”

Skidmore, scrap-iron dealer and bailbondsman, had run afoul of the Internal Revenue boys; and Moe Annenberg’s nationwide wire service—on Dearborn, around the corner from my office—had just been shut down for good.

“Precisely. And I had nothing to do with either. But I’m afraid some people suspect I may have.”

“Oh?”

“I fear for my life, Nate. I’m being followed. I’m being watched. I’ve taken to staying in a secret little flat in a building I own on the North Side.”

We crossed Pulaski and 22nd Street—renamed Cermak Road, though nobody seemed to call it that yet—into a commercial district. A black Ford coupe, a similar make to O’Hare’s, pulled out from the curb and fell in behind us.

I said, “If it’s a bodyguard you want, I’m not interested.”

“That’s not what I want of you. I wish that simple a remedy were called for. What I want is for you to go to them, the feds in question. Woltz and Bennett, their names are.”

“I don’t know ’em.”

“Neither do I! But you’re Ness’s friend. He’ll vouch for you.”

“He’s not a fed anymore; and he hasn’t been in Chicago in years.”

“I know, I know! He’s in Cleveland, but he’d vouch for you, with them, wouldn’t he? There’s such a thing as telephones.”

“Well, sure…”

“Tell them I’m not interested. Tell them
not
to call me. Tell them
not
to leave messages for me.”

“Why don’t you tell them?”

“I’ve had no direct contact with them as yet, and I want to keep it that way.”

We were now in what had been Mayor Cermak’s old turf—some of the storefronts even had lettering in Czech. I’d grown up not far from here, myself—we were just south of Jake Arvey’s territory, where Czech gave way to Yiddish.

“Okay,” I said. “I suppose I could do that.”

“There’s more. I want you to go to Frank Nitti and tell him what you’ve done.”

“Huh?”

He was smiling and it was the oddest damn smile I ever saw: his upper lip was pulled back across his teeth in a display of smugness tinged with desperation. And what he said was everything his smile promised: “As if you’re going behind my back, out of loyalty to him, you go to Nitti and tell him that somebody’s trying to make it look like O’Hare’s informing the feds, but that in fact O’Hare
isn’t
informing, that he went so far as to instruct you to tell the feds he is
not
about to do
any
informing.”

I hate it when people talk about themselves in the third person.

“Why don’t you just go to Nitti yourself?”

“Coming from me, it would be dismissed as self-serving. I might be lying to him. Coming from you, without my knowledge, it can prove my loyalty.”

We went under the El.

“Will you do it?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I don’t want anything to do with Nitti.”

“Nitti likes you. He’ll believe you. He respects you.”

“I don’t know that any of that is true. I’ve had dealings with him from time to time, and he’s been friendly to me in his way, but I always wind up in the middle of something bloody.”

He took one hand off the wheel and reached over and grasped my arm with it. “I’m being set up, Heller. Only somebody on the outside can save me.”

I shook the arm off. “No.”

“Name your retainer.”

“No.”

We crossed Kedzie into Douglas Park. I used to play here as a kid; I wondered if the lagoon was frozen over yet. Probably not.

“Five thousand. Five grand, Heller!”

Judas Priest. For running a couple of errands? Could I say no to that?

“No.” I said. “No more Nitti. Five grand is five grand, but it ain’t worth getting killed over. Now, pull over and let me out.”

“Somebody’s following me.”

“I know. They have been since Twenty-second Street.”

The park was empty of people; the faded green of it, its barren trees, leaves blown away, seemed oddly peaceful. O’Hare was picking up speed, going forty, now, and the Ford was a few car lengths behind, keeping right up.

“Do you have a gun?” he sputtered.

“In my desk drawer in my office, I do. Pull over.”

“Use mine, then!”

“Okay.”

I picked up his automatic and pointed it at him. “Pull over and let me out.”

His cheeks were blood red. “I’m not stopping!”

I put the gun in his face.

He swallowed. “I’ll slow down, but I’m not stopping!”

“I’ll settle for that.”

“At least leave me the gun!”

He slowed, I opened the door, stepped onto the running board, tossed the gun on the seat and dove for grass.

The other black coupe came roaring up, and then it was alongside of O’Hare, both cars going fifty at least, barreling through the park, and then a shotgun barrel extended from the rider’s window of the coupe and blasted a hole in the driver’s window of O’Hare’s car, the roar of the gun and the crash of the glass fighting over who was loudest.

O’Hare swerved away from the other coupe, then back into it, nearly sideswiping them; they were riding the white center line of the four-lane street. I could see them, barely, two anonymous hoodlums in black hats and black coats in their black car with their black gun, which blew a second hole in O’Hare’s window, and in him, too, apparently, for the fancy coupe careened out of control, lurched over the curb, sideswiping a light pole, its white globe shattering, and then shuttled down the streetcar tracks like a berserk sidecar and smashed into a trolley pole and stopped.

The other black Ford coupe cut its speed, stopping for a red light at Western. I couldn’t make out the license plates, but they were Illinois. Then it moved nonchalantly on.

I was the first one to O’Hare’s car. The window on the side I’d been sitting on was spiderwebbed from buckshot. I opened the door and there he was, slumped, hatless, the wheel of the car bent away from him, his eyes open and staring, lips parted as if about to speak, blood spattered everywhere, one hand tucked inside his jacket, like the Little General he’d patterned himself after, two baseball-size holes from close-up shotgun blasts in the driver’s window just above him, like two more empty eyes, staring.

The .32 automatic was on the seat beside him.

I had to find a phone. Not to call the cops: some honest citizen would’ve beat me to it, by now.

I wanted to call Gladys and tell her if she hadn’t already deposited O’Hare’s check, drop everything and do it.

The two dicks from the detective bureau knew who I was, and called my name in to Captain Stege. So I ended up having to hang around waiting for Stege to show up, as did everybody else, four uniformed officers, the two detective bureau dicks, a police photographer, somebody from the coroner’s office, three guys with the paddy wagon that O’Hare would be hauled off to the nearby morgue in. The captain wanted to see the crime scene, including poor old Eddie O’Hare, who accordingly had spent the past forty-five minutes of this cold afternoon a virtual sideshow attraction for the gawkers who’d gathered around the wrecked car, which was crumpled against a trolley pole like a used paper cup. Ogden is a busy street; and several residential areas were close by, as was Mt. Sinai Hospital, a pillar covering the corner of California and Ogden. So there were plenty of gawkers.

Lieutenant Phelan, a gray-complected man in his forties, asked me some questions and took some notes, but it was pretty perfunctory. Phelan knew that Stege would take over, where questioning me was concerned. Stege and me went way back.

The captain was an exception to the Chicago rule: he was an honest cop. He’d helped nail Capone—his raid on the Hawthorne Smoke Shop, where O’Hare’s accountant Les Shumway had once worked, provided the feds with the ledgers that allowed them to make their income-tax case against the Big Fellow. Later Stege (rhymes with “leggy,” which he wasn’t, being just a shade taller than a fireplug) had been the head of the special Dillinger Squad.

His one bad break was getting unfairly tarnished in the Jake Lingle affair. Lingle, a
Tribune
reporter gunned down gangland style in the pedestrian tunnel under Michigan Avenue, had been thick with both Al Capone and the police commissioner—the latter being the bloke who appointed Stege chief of the Detective Bureau. Guilt by association lost Stege that job. And being even vaguely linked to Capone was a bitter pill for one of the Chicago PD’s few good men.

But that was almost ten years ago. Now he was the grand old man of the force, a favorite of the Chicago press when an expert quote on the latest headline crime was needed.

There was a time when Stege despised me. He had me pegged as a crooked cop, which was true to a point but by Chicago standards I was a piker; all I did was give some false testimony at the Lingle trial (in return for a promotion to plainclothes), so the patsy the mob and the D.A.’s office selected could take the fall and put a sensational story that refused to die in the press finally to rest.

Plus, I’d later testified, truthfully, against Miller and Lang, the late Mayor Cermak’s two police bodyguards who had attempted to assassinate Frank Nitti for His Honor, and failed (which Nitti’s hit on Cermak, less than two months later, had not). Testifying against those cops, dirty as they were, still made two black marks against me with Stege: I’d embarrassed the department publicly; and I’d tarnished the martyr Cermak’s memory. Stege, you see, had been a Cermak crony.

Still, in recent years, Stege seemed to have earned a grudging respect for me. We’d bumped heads in the Dillinger case and a few times after and found, despite ourselves, we often saw eye to eye. Considering how much shorter he was than me, that was an accomplishment. Anyway, he no longer seemed to despise me.

Or that’s what I thought, until I saw the look on his face when he climbed out of the chauffeured black-and-white squad car, which had come up with siren screaming, as if there was any rush where O’Hare was concerned.

Stege was a stocky, white-haired little man with a doughy face and black-rim glasses. He looked like an ineffectual owl. Looks can be deceiving.

“Heller, you lying goddamn son of a bitch,” he said, striding over on short legs to where I stood, on the grass, away from the gawkers and the crumpled car and dead Eddie O’Hare. He wore a topcoat as gray as the overcast afternoon and a shapeless brown hat and half of a grayish-brown cigar was stuck in the corner of his tight mouth. He poked my chest with a short, thick finger not much longer than the cigar. “You’re out of business. You overstepped yourself this time, you cagey bastard. You’re going to jail.”

“I’m glad to see you’re keeping an open mind,” I said.

“Stay,” he said, as if to a dog, pointing to the ground where I stood.

He went over and had a lingering look at O’Hare. Then he allowed the paddy-wagon cops to pull the body out of the car onto a sheet. Lieutenant Phelan bent down and frisked the corpse; emptied its pockets. I couldn’t make out the contents from where I stood. The crowd was wide-eyed as the cops wrapped the body in the sheet and tossed him in the paddy wagon with a
thunk
and, with no more ceremony than that, Edward J. O’Hare exited public life.

The car had already been searched; I’d seen Phelan find a steno pad in the glove box of the car—O’Hare’s secretary’s steno pad, perhaps? Had that been the “papers” she wanted to get out of his car? At any rate, Phelan was showing the pad to Stege, who was thumbing through it; he stopped at a page and read, then glanced over at me.

Stege came over and said, “Give me your story from the top.”

“O’Hare approached me to handle a security matter at Sportsman’s Park,” I said. “He had a pickpocket problem there. I went out today and had a look at his plant. Then he offered to drive me into the Loop and I took him up on it.”

“That’s it? That’s your story?”

“Every word is true, Captain.”

“A witness—a guy who was painting windowsills on a ladder over on Talman Avenue—saw the whole thing. And he says you jumped from the car, seconds before this went down.”

I’d seen a guy in work clothes being questioned, earlier, by Phelan. I’d noticed them looking over at me, too, so this revelation came as no real surprise.

“Yes I did jump from the car. I noticed we were being followed, and I noticed too that the car behind us was picking up speed. I asked O’Hare to let me out, he refused, and I jumped.”

Stege grimaced; then he spoke, with a formality filtered through sarcasm: “And what made you think the car following you presented a danger great enough for you to risk injury by jumping from a moving vehicle?”

I nodded over at the wreck that had been O’Hare’s car. “Gee, I don’t know, Captain. For the life of me.”

His cigar was out; he looked at it, as irritated with it as with me, and hurled it off into the park. Then a stubby finger was pointing at me again: “You jumped because you knew they were going to shoot O’Hare.”

“It was a reasonable assumption on my part.”

“That’s all it was? An assumption?”

“O’Hare was acting jumpy, nervous. He was cleaning a gun in his office this afternoon, when I went to see him. He had it on the seat next to him while we drove.”

“And why is that?”

“Haven’t you heard, Captain? Al Capone is getting out of jail in a few days. Not that he would ever think of having a respected community leader like E. J. O’Hare murdered…”

Stege reflected on that for a moment. More to himself than me, he said, glancing over at O’Hare’s smashed car, “There’s no one on earth Capone wouldn’t send to his death if he thought his interests would be served.”

I shrugged. “I’ve heard rumors O’Hare was an informant, and that Capone’s known about it for some time.”

He didn’t confirm or deny that; his putty face looked at me blankly, only the hard dark blue eyes behind the round dark rims of his glasses betraying his dislike for me as he said, pointing at me again, less forcefully now, “You fingered him.”

“What?”

“You fingered O’Hare. You set him up, I was right about you the first time; you
are
a bent cop.”

“I’m a private bent cop, I’ll have you know.”

“You’ve been known to have audiences with Nitti himself. Are you still for sale, after all these years? Are you Nitti’s man, now?”

“I kind of like to think of myself as my own man, Captain. Are you going to charge me with anything, or maybe just haul me into the basement of the nearest precinct house and feed me the goldfish for a few hours?”

Red came to the white face. “I wouldn’t waste a good rubber hose on you.”

“You could always use a lead pipe. Can I go?”

He was lighting up another cigar, the wind catching the flame of his match and making it dance. “You can go,” he said flatly. Puffing. Pointing the cigar at me, now. “But I’m going to investigate this killing myself, personally. And if you were Nitti’s finger man in this nasty little episode, you’ll spend Christmas in the Bridewell, and eternity at Joliet. That’s a promise.”

“That’s funny. It sounded like a threat. What did it say in that steno pad?”

“What?”

“The steno pad. It’s O’Hare’s secretary’s steno pad, right? Her name’s Cavaretta. I don’t know her first name.”

The hard blue eyes squinted at me from behind the owlish glasses. “It’s Antoinette. Toni.”

“I see. Did she take notes on O’Hare’s visit to my office yesterday?”

His lips were pressed together so tight, it was a shock when they parted enough to emit: “Yes.”

“And does it confirm my story about O’Hare wanting some pickpocket work done?”

“Yes. Very conveniently, too.”

He was right about that. Was the steno pad left there on purpose, to explain away my presence? To let the cops tie off the loose end called Heller?

“You met this Cavaretta woman?” he asked.

“A couple of times, yes. Briefly.”

“Any impressions?”

I shrugged. “Handsome woman. Pretty hard-looking, though. Calculating.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Just an impression. She’s in her mid-to late thirties but she isn’t married. Yet she’s not bad looking. Nice shape on her.”

“By which you mean to imply what?”

I shrugged again. “A dago gal from the West Side working for somebody like O’Hare, unmarried. She must be somebody’s sister or mistress or something. Both, maybe.”

Stege was nodding. “I’ll keep that in mind when I question her.”

“You see this as something Capone ordered from inside, Captain?”

He looked over at the wreck again. “Well, it’s more Capone’s style than Nitti’s.”

“True. Nitti doesn’t like to fill the headlines with blood.”

“Nitti would’ve arranged it much less spectacular,” Stege agreed. “Nitti has more finesse. His boys would’ve taken Mr. O’Hare at their leisure and dumped him in a spot from whence he would not emerge, till Gabriel blew his horn.”

The crowd was thinning. With O’Hare gone, there was nothing much to see but the wreck. Some reporters had arrived, but Phelan was holding them off.

I said, “This does seem a strange place for a hit to go down. A major thoroughfare like Ogden, with Cook County Jail a stone’s throw away, ditto for the Audy detention home for juvies. There’s always cops all over this area.”

“Imported killers,” Stege said, nodding again. “Local boys wouldn’t have done this this way.”

Stege was right, although I failed to point out that using out-of-town help was the way Nitti usually went, when he veered from his normal low-profile use of force. It helped keep the heat off the Outfit, if the killers were seen as out-of-towners, where their actions could be written off as having been the bidding of Eastern gangsters.

“It’s the Maloy hit all over again,” Stege said suddenly.

“By God, you’re right,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me.

Tommy Maloy, the movie projectionists’ union boss, had been driving one February afternoon in 1935 on Lake Shore Drive just opposite the abandoned buildings of the World’s Fair, when two men in a car drew up alongside his, poked a shotgun out the window and blasted the driver’s window, blowing a hole in it, then blasted again, blowing a hole in the driver.

“That was supposed to be imported talent, too,” I said.

Stege studied me for a moment, then, impulsively, he took something from his pocket and showed it to me, saying, “What do you make of this?”

It was a memo. It read:
Mr. Woltz phoned and he wants to know if you know anything about Clyde Nimerick. He said you are to call Mr. Bennett.
It was signed
Toni.
The secretary had graceful, feminine handwriting; but there was strength in it, too.

“Where did you find this?” I asked.

“In his topcoat pocket.”

Talk about convenient. “There’s your motive.”

“Yes,” Stege nodded. “Woltz and Bennett are FBI agents. And Clyde Nimerick is a small-timer from O’Hare’s shyster days in St. Louis. A bank robber.”

“So O’Hare was up to his informing tricks again, and the Outfit rubbed him out.”

“Or some St. Louis hoodlums connected to Nimerick did.”

It was a setup, of course. Another sweet setup with Nitti’s crafty name all over it. O’Hare hadn’t been informing again; but Nitti, for some reason, had wanted to make it look like he was. Five’ll get you ten Toni Cavaretta had planted that note in O’Hare’s topcoat pocket, in front of me, when she pretended to be looking for his keys. To bring O’Hare’s federal connection out in the open.

I didn’t mention any of this to Stege. It just wasn’t any of my business. At least it wasn’t any business that I wanted to be mine.

“You know what else he had on him?” Stege asked, smiling humorlessly. “A crucifix, a religious medallion and a rosary.”

“Sounds like he was getting his house in order.”

Stege shook his head, flicked cigar ash to the grass. “Here’s a guy who owns a yacht, who’s got an ocean villa, a four-hundred-acre farm, a house like a palace in Glencoe, and your occasional spare penthouse on the side. Who hangs around at the Illinois Athletic Club with the sporting crowd and the money boys. Who chums with judges and mayors and governors and respected people. Who says publicly he will have no truck with gangsters and yet he’s in bed with ’em and ends up this way.”

“Welcome to Chicago, Captain.”

He smiled again, just a little. Then it faded. His eyes became slits. “Were you part of this, Heller?’

“No.”

“I’d like to believe you.”

“Go right ahead and believe me, then.”

“Would you like a ride back to your office?”

“Please.”