Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 14 (23 page)

His face went blank.

He swallowed. “You…you figured it, then? At that moment?”

I sighed. “No—too much was going on. I was busy grieving for a poor girl with bad taste in men. You arranged that abduction, didn’t you?…Had those clowns grab Jackie and lure me to Aladdin’s Castle. How you must have laughed when I called you to be my backup!”

He leaned forward, the pockmarked face long with attempted earnestness. “I didn’t laugh, Nate. And…I could have shot you, that night. You know that’s true.”

“No, I don’t think so—you weren’t sure I hadn’t told Lou or somebody else about meeting you, there. Better odds to let me live, and keep me thinking you were on my side, Bill’s vengeance-happy partner cutting down the scum who killed him. Scum you hired, right?”

“…That was Tubbo.”

“Was it? Piece of work, old Tub. Like coming to me with that outrageous offer of fifty grand should I find the Bill Drury papers—the notebooks and tapes…when Tubbo knew all along
you
had them. Or was it Kurnitz? Bill would have entrusted them to one of you, his lawyer, or his partner. Either way, they’ve been destroyed.”

“He gave them to me.” O’Conner sounded almost proud of that.

My laugh resonated harshly in the hollow room. “Too bad—you could have sold them for big bucks to the Outfit…only that might have tipped ’em to your role in the murders of Drury and Bas. You even misled those Calumet City boys about the files—when their only real job was to dispose of Mrs. Rocco Fischetti…and me. Pity, to have something so valuable…that you had to get rid of. Did you burn them, Tim? Out in your fireplace?”

He didn’t say anything.

So, for a while, I didn’t say anything.

Then, quietly, Tim said, “So now you’ve told me.”

“Now I’ve told you.”

Eyes tensed, shaking his head, he asked, “Why? Why come here and confront me? Why not just let Giancana take me for a ride?” He searched my face, in desperation.

“Or is this…is this one last expression of a friendship we shared—to give me a few hours to get the hell out?”

I shrugged. “Well, it is out of friendship, in a way. More with Bill, than you. I don’t think I want Annabel to have to suffer further, finding out that her husband’s partner was a greedy psychopath who betrayed him. I thought I’d do you the favor of offering you a graceful way out.”

He reared back. “And what would that be?”

I nodded toward the .38. “Bill Drury’s gun. Your partner’s weapon. Cops kill themselves all the time—ex-cops, too.”

A hollow laugh, an unbelieving grin. “You expect me to pick this gun up, and shoot myself?”

“Yeah.”

“One bullet in it, right?”

“Right.”

“Why wouldn’t I just turn it on you?”

“That’s an option. But you even hint at pointing that gun at me, the gun I’m pointing at you will fire first.”

“I might get lucky.”

“At this table? Anyway, if by some fluke you shot me before I could stop you, Sam Giancana would still finish the job. You’re a dead man, Tim. The question is, how do you want to go out?”

His head almost twisted off, from shaking side to side. “Suicide? Why the hell would I—”

“We can shoot it out right here, and I’ll plead self-defense, and reveal your whole sorry history. Or you can die a tragic police hero, depressed over the death of his murdered partner.”

“I’m a Catholic, Heller. I’m not—”

“You’re an excommunicated Catholic, Tim. And do you really think you’re going anywhere but hell? Jesus is going to forgive
your
sins?”

“…He might.”

“Then go out with a little class. Don’t be just another gangland slaying. Don’t be the Judas that made Annabel Drury’s life even more miserable.”

“What about my kids? You’re a father.”

“You sold them out a long time ago, Tim. Anyway, you want them to remember you as a tortured soul, or a crooked cop? Up to you.”

He swallowed again. “Cold. So cold….”

Was he talking about me, or the temperature?

His eyes seemed woozy, suddenly. “You think I’m a piece of shit, don’t you?”

“What does that matter?”

“You’re worse than I am.”

“Maybe.”

He looked at me, then he looked at the pearl-handled gun. Me, gun, me, gun, me, gun, me, gun….

He picked it up, careful not to aim it my way. He held it in his palm and looked down at it.

“Father forgive me,” he said. “Forgive my sins.”

And he lifted the revolver to his temple and squeezed the trigger. The echo was like a thunder crack in the room; blood and brains and bone matter splattered the empty china hutch, and he tumbled off the chair, sideways, onto the floor, somewhat on his back, his empty eyes staring up at me.

“Good choice,” I said.

And I went out and got my coat and hat, walked unseen into the chill night—the drizzle had let up—and strolled across the woods to my Olds.

From May 1, 1950, to September 1, 1951, the Kefauver Committee heard over six hundred witnesses, racking up close to twelve thousand pages of testimony from minor hoods to major mob figures as well as government officials on every level. The senator’s circus traveled to fourteen cities and put on public display, for the first time in any significant manner, the ongoing connection between crime, politics, and business.

The last stop on the Kefauver tour was the big one: New York, with the entire hearing televised. Notorious mob courier Virginia Hill—who, once upon a time, Charley Fischetti had introduced to Ben “Bugsy” Siegel—brought some sex into the midst of the violence; and former NYC mayor William O’Dwyer generated some genuine pathos, a crime-busting former D.A. brought down by corruption. The real star, however, was Frank Costello, the east coast’s elder statesman among racketeers.

Or anyway, his hands became stars. Costello refused to be photographed, and the TV cameras focused on his nervous hands—tapping, rapping, clenching, unclenching, fingering cigarettes—accompanied by his whispery, raspy off-camera voice. He fudged, he fidgeted, he hedged, he refused to produce material, he stormed out, and of course refused to answer many of the questions on grounds of self-incrimination. Cited for contempt, sentenced to eighteen months, indicted and convicted for income tax evasion, Costello was a major mobster clearly brought down by the Crime Committee.

The Kefauver Committee turned out scores of recommendations, some commendable, others ridiculous. Of nineteen bills proposed by the committee, one—the Wagering Stamp Act— passed…and proved unenforceable. Of forty-five contempt citations to uncooperative witnesses, only three convictions resulted, the courts generally backing up the mobsters’ fifth amendment rights.

On the other hand, the national race wire racket— Continental Press—was forced to shut down in 1952. And the hearings pressured the Immigration Service and IRS into prosecuting hundreds of mobsters during the next eight years. Even J. Edgar Hoover had to admit the existence of the Mafia. Convictions and deportations led to mob warfare, as various individuals and factions fought for control.

And in 1952, Estes Kefauver ran for president, his fame as a gangbuster helping him accumulate the largest number of committed delegates at the Democratic National Convention. But the party regulars—including Harry Truman, who’d been tainted by corruption the committee uncovered—controlled the uncommitted delegates, and Kefauver was denied the nomination.

Kefauver did become Adlai Stevenson’s vice presidential running mate; the Demo duo lost to Eisenhower and Nixon, tried again in ’56, and lost again to Ike and Dick. The senator played out the remainder of his congressional career as a strong, independent, progressive voice in national government. He died of a heart attack in 1963.

Kefauver’s pit bull, Rudy Halley, used his fame on the Crime Committee to run as an independent and win a seat on—and eventually the presidency of—the New York City Council. He tried to be a reformer, without much success, and ran for mayor in 1953, losing as badly as Tubbo Gilbert had that sheriffs race. Oddly, Halley was associated with (legal) gambling interests toward the end of his short life; he died of pancreatitis in 1956. He was only forty-three.

The other counsel, George Robinson, who was from Maine, I lost track of.

The impact of Kefauver’s televised hearings was perhaps the first real demonstration of the power of television. This was not lost on Joe McCarthy, in his efforts to capitalize on the public’s paranoia fueled by the protracted war in Korea, and he convinced many Americans that Commies might be living next door or lurking under the bed. Ultimately the unforgiving tube brought McCarthy down, of course, revealing him in the Army hearings as a liar and a bully, and he died in disgrace, in 1957, in the same mental ward as his mentor, Jim Forrestal.

Columnist Drew Pearson’s muckraking style paved the way for modern investigative reporting, but his real heyday was the 1950s. He died of a heart attack in 1969. Even more than Pearson, Lee Mortimer’s successes were tied to the ’50s. Married five times—calling into question Sinatra’s insistence that Mortimer was homosexual—the
New York Mirror
columnist wrote several more
Confidential
books with Jack Lait, hosted a radio show, and died in bed of a heart attack in March 1963.

A heart attack took Rocco Fischetti, as well. He made peace with the Outfit, though his role was diminished; he maintained residences in Florida and in Skokie, Illinois. He told me once— we became, oddly enough, friendly again—that his sole ambition was not to die violently; he feared winding up shot to death in an alley, flung against garbage cans. He got his wish, dying a low-key death on a visit to relatives in Long Island, New York, in July 1964. He was sixty.

I never told him, by the way, that I was the one who busted up his trains.

Frank Sinatra made his comeback, as you may have heard, and he continued to be friends with Joey Fischetti, who received at least an occasional fee as a “talent agent,” particularly for Sinatra’s dates in Miami Beach, including at the Fountainbleau Hotel, with which Joey was affiliated.

In early 1951, Sinatra was asked to provide the Kefauver Committee with an interview, and he complied—a top secret one, at four in the morning in a law office at Rockefeller Center. He told them nothing—a list of gangsters was read off to him, and he informed committee lawyer Joseph Nellis he knew them “to say ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ to…. Well, hell, you go into show business, you meet a lot of people.”

Perhaps because of my request to Pearson to apply gentle pressure, Kefauver accepted this private testimony and chose not to embarrass Frank by calling him as a hearing witness.

But Frank’s mob connections would dog his heels his entire life—five grand jury subpoenas, two IRS investigations, a congressional summons, and a subpoena from the New Jersey State Crime Commission would follow over the years. So would a Congressional Gold Medal, presented to him by President Clinton in 1997, the year before Sinatra’s death.

Joey Fischetti passed away some time in the ’70s, if I recall, but Frank had long since grown tighter with one other mobster—Sam Giancana. Throughout the early ’50s, following the Kefauver hearings, the leadership of the Chicago Outfit passed between Ricca, Accardo, and Giancana. During this period numerous gangland murders—all unsolved—were committed; one of the first was an attorney named Kurnitz, who turned up along that same Calumet City roadside as those two heroic police detectives. His throat had been slit and his tongue had been cut out and stuck in the new aperture.

In the early ’50s, Giancana engineered a violent takeover of the numbers rackets from black policy kings. His interests eventually included Las Vegas, Mexico, and Cuba, and he ran in show business circles that included Sinatra, Joe E. Lewis, Keely Smith, and his longtime paramour, Phyllis McGuire of the singing McGuire Sisters. He shared a mistress with President Kennedy, and his involvement with the CIA is thought to have led to his murder in his Oak Park home—shot in the back of the head, frying up sausages.

Paul Mansfield was true to his word and drove his wife Jayne to California, after he got out of the service; she kissed the ground hello, shortly after they crossed the state line. Shortly after that, she kissed Paul goodbye. She made it in Hollywood, but via New York, playing a Marilyn Monroe-like character in a Broadway play by the author of
The Seven Year Itch;
this led to a 20th Century Fox contract, and major motion pictures, most notably
The Girl Can’t Help It.

Jayne—like Mamie Van Doren (a onetime Charley Fischetti sweetheart)—became a road company Marilyn. Her sexbomb persona seeming increasingly passé as the repressed ’50s gave way to the swinging ’60s; she made a nudie cutie movie, promoting it by posing nude for
Playboy,
which led to a famous pornography charge for the magazine. Before her auto accident death in 1967, she had been reduced to TV guest shots, cameo appearances in movies, nightclub strip acts, and leads in low-budget foreign films. For all the highs and lows of her bizarre career, however, Jayne did achieve her goal of enduring stardom.

Jack Ruby made a name for himself, too.

The A-1 Detective Agency thrived in Chicago and Hollywood, and I maintained residences in both cities, though I would always be a Second City boy at heart. Sometimes I would stay in L.A. long enough to be jarred, on my return, by the changes in my town. Oh, the underlying casual corruption remained the same. But much of the character of the first half of the twentieth century in Chicago was getting chipped away at, as the second half got under way.

In 1960 the Chez Paree closed, for example, made irrelevant by the intimate likes of Mr. Kelly’s, the Happy Medium, and Hefner’s Playboy Club. Riverview amusement park shut down in 1967—all the famous rides sold off, the attractions demolished…including Aladdin’s Castle.

The Federal Building was pulled down in 1965, and a new one with much less character took its place; but the Monadnock Building still stands, and St. Andrew’s Church is open for business.