True Crime (22 page)

“The Lord will take care of that.”

I sighed. “I suppose he will. Please continue your story.”

He went on in a voice as hollow as his eyes; his words had a formal, practiced sound—as if he’d said these words to himself every night, over and over again, when he should have been sleeping.

“It was my cruel treatment of Louise that drove her from me,” he said. “Into his arms. But he was worse than I was. More cruel, more jealous than ever I was. His punishment exceeded the crimes.”

“Mr. Petersen, I’m not following you. What man are you taking about? Her husband?”

He looked at me sharply. “Yes. Her husband.”

“And he was a farmer, too?”

“Yes. And she’d go off to town without asking him. And do Lord knows what. Men. Drink.” He covered his face with one weathered hand and wept. Tears found their way through the cracks of his fingers and fell on his lap. I’d never had a client cry in the office before—not even when I handed ’em my list of expenses—and it made me uncomfortable. This man was devastated by the road his daughter had gone down. His moral and religious convictions must’ve been strong, I thought, for him to take having a loose daughter so hard.

I got up and began filling a cup of water for him from the cooler, which said, “Glug glug.” I said, “So her husband beat her, and she skipped.”

He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, dried his eyes, blew his nose. “Yes. She ran off.”

I handed him the cup of water; he drank it greedily, then didn’t know what to do with the cup. I took it from him and wadded and dropped it in the wastebasket behind the desk. Sat again.

“Did she come home to you?” I said. “After she left her husband?”

He shook his head. “She never thought to. She never even thought to. She lumped me in with Seth—I must’ve seemed just as bad as he was, in her mind.”

“Seth is her husband.”

One quick curt nod.

“How’s he feel about getting Louise back?”

“Ain’t interested. He’s took up with several other ‘ladies,’ hear tell.”

“I see.”

“But I want her back. I want to do right by her. Make it up to her. She’ll like livin’ in town….”

“I’m sure. You mentioned something about her running with a ‘bad crowd.’ How bad?”

The blood drained out of his face.

“That bad?” I said.

“Ever hear of a man called ‘Candy’ Walker?”

“Jesus.”

He sighed heavily. “I take it you heard of him.”

I had. I’d never met him, but Clarence “Candy” Walker was a small-time hood from the North Side, a handsome ladies’ man of about thirty, a wheel man who drove beer trucks for Bugs Moran in the old days and had been in Nitti’s stable till maybe a year ago. Since then—like Baby Face Nelson and a few other graduates of the Capone mob who’d been laid off after Repeal—he’d been seen driving for the Barkers. The bank-robbing Barkers.

He’d also driven for Dillinger a few times in the last six months, if I wasn’t mistaken. Small world.

I said, “I take it from your tone you know who Candy Walker is.”

“He drives what they call in the papers the ‘getaway car’ in robberies. He’s a bank robber.”

“He drives getaway cars, and he’s a bank robber. Yes.”

He dug in his left suitcoat pocket. Took out a folded newspaper clipping; as he did, he said, “She ran off to Chicago about a year ago. She was seen with him here. She was living with him, as a matter of fact.”

“How did you find this out?”

“Seth reported her as a missing person. He left it pretty much drop, after that. But I kept after the sheriff’s office, and the sheriff’s office said the Chicago police knew she was in Chicago living with this Candy Walker feller.”

“If you’re thinking Walker is still around Chicago, I’d doubt it…”

“That’s what the sheriff’s office’s been tellin’ me. And I can figure that for myself. Melvin Purvis has made your town too hot for them gangsters. This Walker’s living out on the road somewheres. Going from here to there. Stealing. May the Good Lord damn him to hell for eternity.”

“Good odds on that,” I said, taking the clipping he was holding out. It was an interior page from a
Daily News
from July 2 of this year, detailing the robbery of the Merchants National Bank in South Bend, Indiana.

At 11:30
A.M
. on Saturday, June 30, five men (later identified as John Dillinger, Homer Van Meter, Baby Face Nelson, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd and Clarence “Candy” Walker) parked their Hudson in front of the bank. Walker remained at the wheel, and Nelson, his machine gun under his coat, took up position near the rear of the car. Van Meter, with a rifle, took position just down the street, in front of a shoe store. Inside the bank Dillinger and Floyd made a withdrawal—only when the tellers weren’t filling their sacks up quickly enough, Floyd fired a burst from his machine gun into the ceiling, to perk up the proceedings. Outside, a traffic cop heard the commotion and came running. Van Meter fired his rifle and the cop fell in the street, stopping traffic. The owner of a jewelry shop down the way ran out of his shop and shot at Nelson, whose bulletproof vest saved him as he spun and began firing wildly. Only the cop was killed, but several pedestrians were wounded, including the hostages who were made to ride the running boards as Candy Walker wheeled out of town, with around twenty-five thousand of the bank’s money in tow. On the west side of South Bend, the hostages were set free; the group split in two and climbed into separate cars.

This was, as far as anybody knew, Dillinger’s last caper.

Of course that wasn’t what made this clipping noteworthy: it was the other story, the sidebar. A Pontiac with Indiana license plates stopped at a filling station near Aurora, Illinois, later that same afternoon. Two men and two women were in the car. The men seemed to be Candy Walker and Homer Van Meter; police sketches of them were reproduced, as well as of the “unidentified molls” who’d been with them.

Petersen stood and pointed at one of the molls pictured. From an inside coat pocket he produced a snapshot of himself and a pretty teenage girl with blond bobbed hair, a farmhouse glimpsed behind them. He had his arm around her and was smiling—a real smile, not a crease—and she had a glazed smile, behind which unhappiness clearly lurked. Still, these were happier times (at least for him).

And, of course, the girl in the snapshot closely resembled the police sketch of one of the women seen with Candy Walker and Homer Van Meter.

“Mr. Petersen, this police sketch resembles your daughter, but she’s a pretty woman, a young woman, and a lot of pretty young women look pretty much like this….”

“It’s her,” he said, flatly. “Now let me show you something else.”

This guy had something in every pocket; he reached into his right suitcoat pocket and produced another clipping. He spread it before me.

“This was in this morning’s paper,” he said. “I read it and went and got on the train—I knew I’d waited long enough. Maybe too long.”

I’d already seen this: a story from this morning’s
Trib.
But it took on a new significance, now.

The St. Paul police had shot about fifty bullets into Homer Van Meter yesterday. Not surprisingly, it killed him.

Petersen, trembling, sat back down.

“I’ve been reading the papers,” he said, “reading the blood in the headlines. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker…John Dillinger…now Van Meter…the outlaws, they’re all going to die like that, aren’t they? In hails of bullets?”

I shrugged. “More or less.”

“I’m afraid for my daughter, Mr. Heller.”

“I don’t blame you.”

He sat forward; earnestness engulfed his face. “Retrieve her for me.”

“What?”

“Get her back for me.” He pointed to the Van Meter clipping. “Before she meets a similar fate.” He sat back, as if to say, I rest my case.

I looked at this gaunt Midwestern ghost sitting holding onto the ebony armrests on the chrome tubes of my silly goddamn chair, and I wanted to laugh. Or cry.

Instead I simply said, “Mr. Petersen, surely you understand what you’re asking is, well…a tall order. Maybe an impossible one.”

He said nothing, just leaned forward, with anticipation. Waiting for me to say yes. Or even no. Something.

His daughter would go to jail, upon capture—if she was lucky. She could just as easily die—go down “in a hail of bullets,” as he had said. But since she was just another faceless moll (but for one police artist’s sketch), a name that hadn’t got into the papers as yet, it was vaguely possible it wasn’t too late, that she
could
be rescued, that she
might
be pulled from out of the fire before the fat fell in….

“Okay, Mr. Petersen,” I said. “I tell you what. I’ll snoop around a bit. Walker used to live in Chicago, so maybe through some of his old contacts I can find out if your daughter’s still with him. If so, maybe I can get a message to her that her father would welcome her home, with open arms.”

He shook his head no. “That wouldn’t be enough. You have to
find
her. You have to bring her back. Whether she wants to come or not, Mr. Heller.”

“How can I promise to bring her back, if she doesn’t want to come? Be reasonable, Mr. Petersen. After all, that’d be kidnapping….”

“Is it kidnapping to return a daughter to her father?”

He had me there.

And knew it. He stood and dug in another pocket; right pants pocket this time. He took out a thick fold of bills, money-clipped. Counted out five hundred dollars in twenties.

I watched this, amazed. With probably about the same look he’d given my modern chair, coming in.

I picked the stack of money up in one hand; it felt heavy.

“Mr. Petersen—why five hundred dollars?”

He got oddly formal again: “Because you will take risks. You will need to go among the wolves.”

He had a point; it would be dangerous to go around asking questions about the girlfriend of a wanted man, a public enemy. But five hundred dollars was five hundred dollars.

“What do you expect for your money, Mr. Petersen?”

“I want you to look for Louise, Mr. Heller.”

“For—for how long?”

“For five hundred dollars’ worth.”

“At ten bucks a day, that’s a long time.”

“Find her, and you can keep what you don’t use. If you use it up, call me…” He reached in his left pants pocket and removed a slip of paper with his name and phone number and address written on it, and gave it to me. “…I will probably authorize you to continue.”

Petersen picked his hat up off my desk.

“And,” he said, putting on the hat, “there’s a thousand more if you deliver her to me.”

That knocked the breath out of me. I was stunned by the kind of money this simple retired farmer was throwing around. “Mr. Petersen, excuse me for asking this—I don’t mean to pry, or look a gift horse in the mouth. But how can you possibly afford this, in times like these? Or
any
time?”

His crease of a smile seemed weary, now, and somehow worldly. “My health is bad, Mr. Heller,” he said. “I’m a lunger. Picked it up in the war. I got my pension to get me by and then some. That’s how I was able to sell my farm, and get this money together—to find my girl. I got my little house in De Kalb, where we can live together. On my pension. She can make a new start. Find herself a nice little job, and find a good new man, to take care of her after her daddy’s gone. Which will be soon, Lord’s will be done.”

He extended his hand across the desk and I stood and shook it.

“Tell her that when you find her,” he said. “Maybe then she’ll come home of her own volition.”

I nodded.

“But
find
her,” he said, and slammed the desk with his fist with sudden force on the “find”; the lamp shook. Then more quietly, and a little embarrassed, he said, “Please find her. Bring her home.”

And he left me alone in the office with my modern furniture and his old-fashioned money.

When Frank Nitti wasn’t holding court at the Capri Restaurant, or meeting with the inner circle of the Outfit at his home in suburban Riverside, he would occupy a suite in various Loop hotels. This was standard operating practice, for meeting with politicians and labor leaders and the like. It made a safer, more neutral ground.

So it was no surprise to me, after I called the Capri and sought an audience with Nitti, that the return phone call I received was a male voice that did not identify itself telling me to be in the lobby of the Bismarck Hotel, two o’clock Monday afternoon.

The Bismarck was on the corner of LaSalle and Randolph, across the street from City Hall—making it a natural place for Nitti to hold meetings. The recently rebuilt hotel dominated German Square, the group of German clubs, steamship offices and shops at the west end of the Rialto Theatre district. But my meeting that Monday afternoon would have a distinctly Italian cast.

I went past the uniformed Bismarck doorman and through the revolving door and up the wide, red-carpeted stairway and my footsteps echoed across the marble floor of the high-ceilinged, elaborate lobby, where I found an overstuffed sofa and sat. Pretty soon a rather short man in a gray suit approached me; his shortness meant nothing: this was a big man. He had shoulders broad enough to balance a midget on either side of his oblong head. His hair was dark and starting to thin; his dark eyes were colder and harder than the marble floor beneath us.

He was Louis “Little New York” Campagna, Frank Nitti’s personal bodyguard.

He didn’t speak. He just stood in front of me and had a faintly disgusted look—and Little New York Campagna looking faintly disgusted was scarier than Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff put together, I might add—and jerked his head, indicating I was to get up. I got up.

I followed him onto an elevator, and the uniformed operator didn’t ask for our floor; he just took us up to the seventh, where Campagna waited for me to get out first.

As we were walking down the hallway, I said, “I hope there’s no hard feelings about that other time.”

I’d knocked Campagna out once; it’s a long story.

Without glancing at me, just walking alongside me, he said, “As long as Frank says there’s no hard feelings, there’s no hard feelings.”

I left it at that.

At the end of the hallway was a little vestibule; the door within the vestibule said 737, with a little gold plaque that said
Presidential Suite
below it. I stood to one side of the door, within the vestibule, and cold-eyed Campagna stood to the other. He stood with his arms loose at his sides, big hands free.

“Wish I could find a suit like that,” I said. “I can’t find one a gun won’t bulge under.”

He said, “You couldn’t afford my tailor.”

I shrugged. “Probably not.”

It occurred to me then that he hadn’t patted me down for a gun; he could tell just looking at me I wasn’t armed—the suit I had on wasn’t tailored well enough to conceal one. Grooming hints from the underworld.

The door opened and a fat little man with wire-frame glasses, a loud tie and a black silk suit came out, smiling, calling back behind him, “Always a pleasure, Frank!”

Campagna reached over and shut the door for the fat little man, who put his hat on and was going past me when I said, “How you doing, Willie?”

Willie Bioff squinted behind his wire-frames, then said, “Heller?”

“That’s right.”

He smirked. “How’s it feel to be an ex-cop?”

“How’s it feel to be an ex-pimp?”

The smirk shifted to a sneer. “Once a smart-ass always a smart-ass.”

“Once a pimp always a pimp.”

Bioff thought about doing something about my mouth. I knew he wouldn’t. He was a former union slugger, but known for doing his slugging with a blackjack from behind. And in his pimp days he was famous for slapping his whores around. I’d arrested him, back in my plainclothes days, for that very act. Right before I was assigned to the pickpocket detail, I’d accompanied one of Chicago’s honest detectives, William Shoemaker, “Old Shoes” himself, on a brothel raid. We’d caught Willie going down the back stairs with a tally sheet, and when we hauled him back upstairs and one of his girls admitted Willie was her pimp, he’d hauled off and slugged her. We got a six-month conviction on the little bastard, but he never served it. Chicago.

Bioff was still standing there, trying to decide if he should get tough—maybe thinking Campagna would back him up. But then Bioff had no way of knowing why I was present; maybe I was on Nitti’s team, too, and he better not risk messing with me. He was nothing if not a coward.

Bioff said, “We should let bygones be bygones,” and waddled quickly off.

“I hate that little pimp,” I said.

Campagna looked at me impassively, then his tight mouth turned up at one corner. I took that to be a sign of agreement, and a possible softening of the tension between us. Still, if Nitti ever wanted me dead, Campagna would probably push to the front of the line to get the job.

For now he pointed one of his shotgun-barrel fingers at me and said, “Wait here—I’ll see how Frank’s doing.”

I waited; it was just a matter of seconds and Campagna was back, saying, “Frank wants to know if your business is private.”

“Pardon?”

Campagna looked faintly disgusted again. “Can you talk in front of anybody, or is it for Frank’s ears only?”

“Frank’s ears only,” I said.

Campagna nodded and went back in, came right out, said, “It’ll be just a few minutes. Frank’s getting a haircut.”

“Oh,” I said.

We stood there for a while, on either side of the door.

Suddenly Campagna said, “Me, too.”

“What?”

“I hate that little pimp, too. Bioff. You want a cigar?”

“Uh, no thanks.”

Campagna took out a cigar as thick as one of his fingers and lit it. It smelled pretty good, as cigars go. There were guys all over town who’d give their soul for a job that paid per day what that cigar cost.

Not that I blamed Campagna for enjoying himself; in his business, life was sometimes short—why not enjoy it while you had it? And I was grateful for the gesture he’d made—some human contact between me and him, however slight, might be good for my health. At least now I didn’t figure he’d be wanting to be first in line to bump me off.

The door opened suddenly and a white-smocked, skinny, swarthy man with a pencil-thin mustache and slick hair came rushing out, saying “’Cusa, ’cusa,” and shutting the door quickly behind him. Something smashed against that door—something glass, shattering.

The man, a barber apparently, seemed frightened but Campagna stopped him before he could run away and gave him a fin, saying, “You’re lucky to get it.”

The barber nodded, his eyes wide, terrified, and scurried off down the hall.

Campagna, his mouth turned up at either corner, genuinely amused now, pointed a thumb at the door and said, “Frank said you could go in as soon as his barber came out. So you can go on in, Heller.”

I swallowed. “You’re too good to me, Campagna.”

Campagna actually grinned for a moment—the first indication I’d had since knowing him that he had teeth—and opened the door and I went inside.

Glass shards from a small hand mirror crunched under my feet as I entered the plushly carpeted living room of the suite. Nitti was standing looking in a wall mirror, a white barber’s gown tucked in his collar; he was touching his hair, looking at himself with disapproval.

“Come in, Heller,” he said, not looking at me. “Find a seat.”

There was a high-backed chair near a sofa in this white-appointed, gold-trimmed, rather Victorian-looking suite. Black hair trimmings peppered the white carpet near the chair, so I sat on the sofa.

Nitti yanked the white gown from under his neck and pitched it behind him as he walked over to the chair and sat, placing his hands on his knees. He was in gray pants and a white shirt. His suitcoat and tie were on a coffee table nearby, but he didn’t put them on. He was shaking his head.

“They don’t make ’em like they used to,” he said.

“Uh, what’s that, Frank?”

“Barbers. That little cocksucker makes more money off me in fifteen minutes than I got in a week, when I was in the business, and look what he does to me!” He gestured to his immaculately cut black hair, slicked back, parted at the left, perfect.

“It looks pretty good to me, Frank.”

“Does it? Well, maybe I’m too fussy. That’s the fifth barber I tried this year. And they all got the same goddamn problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Their goddamn hands are shaking! Look—” He bent over and tipped his head to one side, folded his ear back; a little red showed. “I’m fuckin’ bleeding! They ain’t barbers, they’re butchers! In my day, a barber had hands like
this
—” And he held his hands out straight in front of him and demonstrated how rock-steady they were.

“Maybe they’re intimidated, Frank.”

That seemed to confound him. “What the hell for?”

“Well,” I said. “They’re cutting Frank Nitti’s hair. There’s a certain amount of pressure in that, don’t you think?”

He thought about that, nodded. “I never thought of it. But you’re right, Heller. It could make a barber nervous, knowin’ he’s cuttin’ another barber’s hair. You may be right. Now.” He slapped his knees. “What’s this about?”

“I’m here for a favor—if you’re willing to grant one.”

He shrugged expansively. “You know I owe you, kid. From way back.”

“Well, I don’t figure you owe me. But if you’d do this for me, I could maybe owe you.”

“You don’t sound nuts about owing me, kid.”

I admitted I wasn’t. “I would like to ask that if you ever call my marker in,” I said, “you’ll restrict it to more or less legal services. Maybe sometime you could use some investigating and wouldn’t want to use your own people—something on the q.t. I could be your man. No fee, no questions asked.”

He nodded, smiling rather absently, almost to himself. “Maybe I ought to quit thinking of you as a kid, Heller. You seem to’ve grown up on me, when I wasn’t lookin’.”

I smiled at him. “You’re always looking, Frank.”

He laughed, the haircut forgotten. “You got that right. Look, I am grateful to you for that last little job you did for me.”

I didn’t know what he meant; I didn’t say so, but he could see it in my face.

“You know,” he said, gesturing with one open hand. “When I gave you that C to mind your own business.”

He meant Dillinger; I was wearing the suit I’d used part of the money on.

“That’s okay, Frank.”

“You coulda gone to the papers, coulda found some news-hound who’d paid you good dough for your story. I ain’t sure anybody woulda believed you, but it’s nice that story never got told. Coulda made a ripple or two in the lake. And ripples can turn into waves, if you ain’t careful.”

“Lake’s real calm these days, Frank.”

“I know. Let’s keep it that way. Now. What favor you need?”

“Remember a guy named Candy Walker?”

Nitti nodded, and I told him my story. Told him Walker’s current moll was a client’s daughter and that client wanted me to try to retrieve her before she got caught in a crossfire somewhere.

I said, “Walker’s running with the Barkers, I understand.”

Nitti confirmed that. “That little penny-ante outfit’s come a long way. They’re in real tight with some of our friends in St. Paul.”

By “our,” he meant the Outfit’s friends, not his and mine. And those friends were the Twin Cities branch of the Syndicate and various corrupt politicians on the municipal and even the state level.

“I, uh, figured you might’ve had some dealings with the Barkers.”

He eyed me shrewdly. “How’d you figure that?”

“Can I speak frankly?”

He nodded.

“Well, when Shotgun Ziegler bought it in Cicero, I figured the Boys either did it or approved it.”

Ziegler, a Capone gunman said to be one of the bogus “cops” who gunned down Bugs Moran’s boys in a North Side garage on Saint Valentine’s Day back in ’29, had been cut in half, his head blasted into fragments, by four shotguns outside his favorite Cicero café this past March. Like Baby Face Nelson and Candy Walker, Ziegler had been a Capone soldier who defected in post-Repeal days to the army of outlaws, specifically the Barker-Karpis gang. Word was he had engineered the Hamm kidnapping for the Barkers—one of several crimes Melvin Purvis tried to pin on the Touhy mob, incidentally—but in the kidnapping’s aftermath the Barkers had soured on Ziegler.

Nitti smiled humorlessly and leaned forward, his legs apart, his hands loosely clasped together, dangling between his knees. “Let me tell you about Mr. Ziegler. A lesson can be learned, there. He drank too much. You ever see me drink too much, Heller?”

“I can’t recall seeing you drink at all, Frank.”

“Right! I’m a businessman, Heller, mine is a business like any other. And businessmen don’t get in their fuckin’ cups and tell tales out of school.”

“Ziegler told tales out of school.”

Nitti nodded, still smiling, still without humor. “He was hangin’ out at saloons and braggin’ about his accomplishments. Startin’ with a certain accomplishment that dates back to February of ’29, if you get my drift. Right up to a couple of more recent accomplishments—namely, snatches. And I don’t mean he was braggin’ about gettin’ laid.”

He meant the Hamm and Bremer kidnappings, said to be the work of the Barber-Karpis gang (said by everybody but Melvin Purvis and his “G-men,” that is).

“Frank, I think you know I can keep my mouth shut. So if you’re willing to put me in touch with Candy Walker—or put me in touch with somebody who
could
put me in touch with Candy Walker—I sure wouldn’t go spreading your Barker connection around.”

“I know you wouldn’t, Heller. I trust you. Besides, if you did, you’d wind up in an alley.”

I breathed out heavily. “Fair enough. Will you help me out?”

He stood. He walked across the room to the bar and poured himself some soda water on ice; he offered me some and I said no thanks. He came back and sat and sipped the soda water, which bubbled in his glass like the thoughts in my brain.