Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 14 (5 page)

“Oh yeah,” I said, amazed and appalled by the array of atomic age nonsense: kidney-shaped glass on a claw hand of sculptured walnut serving as a coffee table, green Fiberglas chairs with black wire legs, black metal floor lamp that looked like a praying mantis.

“Most of this,” he said, gesturing expansively, “I buy overseas. The Scandinavians get all the credit, but the best modern design is Italian. Carlo Mollino, Gio Ponti, Gian-franco Frattini….”

“No kidding.”

“Take a look at this,” Charley said, waving me over to several framed paintings on the wall (Joey had taken a three-legged Fiberglas chair, proving it could be sat in). The canvases were abstractions, doodlings in color and geometry.

At his side, I regarded these masterpieces, wondering if Drury’s microphone was snugged behind one of them.

“You know, the great artists, they all had patrons,” Charley said. “In the Renaissance. Guys like Da Vinci, Michelangelo. It was an Italian thing.”

“So I heard.”

“See, I have a lot of fine pieces in my collection. I have three Dalis. That’s a Picasso over the fire. I got a Miro, and a Klee. Worth a goddamn fortune. But these, these mean more to me.”

“I take it these are new painters.”

The tiny mouth curved in a slice of a smile. “You know, Nate, you impress me, your sensitivity. Your insight.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re absolutely right. I’m tight with Ric Riccardo. He’s my artistic advisor.”

An accomplished artist himself, Riccardo ran a popular, artsy cafe on Rush Street out of a converted warehouse, where he had single-handedly started the local craze of restaurants and merchants exhibiting artists and sculptors.

Charley was saying, “Ric only recommends the best of the new young talent.”

What, as compared to the old young talent?

“You see, Nate, I’m not just a collector—I’m a patron.”

Like the Borgias,
I thought.

“Take this one here,” he said, pointing to a canvas that appeared randomly splattered with green, brown, and black. “Ric says this fella is going to be the next Jackson Pollock.”

I didn’t burst Charley’s bubble and point out there already was a Jackson Pollock; I merely nodded and murmured appreciatively if nonverbally.

He slipped his arm around me. He smelled like Vitalis, too, but the cologne was something more expensive than Old Spice—something more expensive than I could recognize.

“Nate,” he said, “I feel comfortable with you. I really do. I am so used to uncouth company.”

“Yeah, I hate that.”

“I hope you feel comfortable with me. A lot of people get the wrong idea about me, you know.”

“I know what you mean.”

“People like us—you’re from the West Side, right?”

“Right.”

“Maxwell Street?”

I nodded.

Stepping away, he shrugged elaborately. “You know about coming up from the streets. Rough beginnings.” He leaned near again and put a hand on my shoulder and whispered: “That’s the trouble with Joey. We pampered him. He come to be a man when we already had our family position, our fortune.”

“That can be hard on a kid.” Even a forty-year-old one.

“What I mean is, coming up, we all make youthful indiscretions. Now, I’m a respectable businessman—and a connoisseur of the finer things.”

“Obviously.”

“I’m not gonna kid you, Nate—you swim in the same Chicago sewers I do….”

From connoisseurs to Chicago sewers, in one leap.

“…and you know I have to keep my hand in certain areas of…we’ll call it entertainment. Servicing public needs. You were Frank Nitti’s friend, and you know that it was his dream to be entirely legitimate.”

“Problem is,” I said, “these days, legitimate business isn’t entirely legitimate.”

He patted my shoulder, twice. “Excellent point. Excellent point. And politics…which is an area of expertise of mine…it’s no better. The reality of business is compromise. Only in the arts can a person be truly uncompromising.”

He continued showing me around his sky nest—spent a good fifteen minutes showing off his collection, about a third of which was valuable stuff by name artists, the rest junk by “up and coming” new “talents.” Charley spoke well for a mob guy, but he wasn’t fooling me.

For all his posturing and pretension, and his man-of-the-world airs, this was still the same Charley Fischetti who’d been his uncle Al Capone’s bodyguard/chauffeur, and nicknamed Trigger Happy.

This was the same Charley Fischetti who started as an alky cooker and rose to be Capone’s top lieutenant, who had been implicated in several murders though arrested only once—by Bill Drury—with a conviction for carrying a concealed weapon (reversed in the higher courts).

And this was the same Charley Fischetti who was the Outfit’s top political fixer, tunneling endless money into local and national campaigns, whose criminal business interests extended to St. Louis, Kansas City, Las Vegas, and Miami.

Gambling. Prostitution. Narcotics. Extortion. Usury. Bribery. Murder. Those were the arts Charley Fischetti was a patron of.

“Hey, I don’t want you thinking I’m a goddamn snob,” Charley said. “Let me show you my TV room—we’ll talk there…. Joey, wait out here and bring Rocky in, when he shows.”

My host took me by the elbow—he had a barely perceptible limp, from a long-ago gun battle—and soon we were in a more casual room, with cork-paneled walls and windows with closed Venetian blinds and geometric-design drapes. A pair of boxy pink foam-cushion couches hugged two walls to form a V, with a couple chairs of the same ilk, only light blue, forward of the douches at left and right, all squatting on fuzzy white wall-to-wall carpet, sharing space with light-blond oak tables. The seating faced a blond console—as wide as the couches—with a TV in the middle with a huge screen…twenty-one inch, easy…and built-in radio and record player and album storage bins, with a cloth-covered speaker as big as the picture tube.

“Yeah, I’m a TV fan,” Charley said, man of the people that he was, slipping behind the blond oak bar along the side wall. “Care for something?”

“Rum and Coke, ice.”

“I got martinis made.”

“That’s fine.”

He poured from a pitcher. “I’m addicted to that damn tube…Ed Sullivan, Sid Caesar, and this
Studio One
—now that’s serious drama.”

“So is watching Jake La Motta catch Dauthille with a right.”

He came around, a martini with olive in either hand. “No frog is gonna send one of my people to the canvas.”

By “my people,” I wasn’t sure whether Charley meant an Italian or a mob-owned boxer—La Motta fit either category, after all.

We sat on the pink sofa opposite the massive TV console and he gestured toward it, with his martini. “What I’m afraid of is this Kefauver clown will be the next Uncle Miltie.”

“They’ve been televising some of these hearings.”

“Yeah, and ’cause of the response,
all
the New York hearings, after first of the year, are going nationwide!” He shook his head. “That’s why I can’t testify…. Not that I have anything to hide, but the bad publicity…. That I can’t abide.”

He set his martini on the coffee table and reached in a sportcoat pocket for a small round silver box, the lid of which he popped off; he selected two small pink pills and took them with a drink of martini.

“This bum ticker of mine,” he said, shaking his head. “Goddamn business pressures.”

Joey and his brother Rocco came in—Rocco had traded in his maroon robe and railroad cap for a dark brown sportcoat, lighter brown slacks, and a yellow shirt.

I nodded to Rocco, and he nodded back; he went behind the bar and came back with a bottle of beer. He and Joey sat on the adjacent sofa.

“What took you?” Charley asked Rocco, a faint edge of crossness in his voice.

Rocco’s ugly face got uglier. “That cunt—she got mouthy again. She’s fuckin’ worthless. I told her to pack her fuckin’ bags. She’s got half an hour and then I throw her down the fuckin’ stairs.”

Shaking his head, Joey said, “She used to be such a nice kid.”

Rocco sneered, shook his head once, and had a gulp of Blatz.

Charley sipped his martini, shrugged, and said, “Sooner or later they all wear out their welcome…. Rock, we were just getting started, here. I explained to Nate how we don’t like this bad publicity.”

Rocco nodded, belched. “This traveling dog-and-pony show, it’s really just a sham, y’know. Kefauver don’t know his dick from a doughnut.”

“A sham?” I said.

“Don’t misunderstand my brother,” Charley said. “The senator is a sincere, honest man—but he’s a man, with weaknesses, or anyway…traits.”

“What kind of traits?”

“Well, he’s impulsive for one. Look at him, bull in the china shop, with this investigation. Not thinking about the political ramifications for his own party.”

“What I heard,” I said, “was he’s not coming to Chicago till after the election.”

Which was only a month and a few weeks away. This was an off-year national election, after all, and Kefauver’s fellow Democrat Senator Scott Lucas—a powerful man in Washington, the Senate majority leader—was up for re-election. And the Demos locally were running Captain Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert, chief investigator of the State’s Attorney’s office, for Cook County sheriff.

Both Lucas and Gilbert were bedfellows of local political boss Jake Arvey—which meant they were also bedfellows of the blond-haired art connoisseur sitting next to me.

“Also,” Charley was saying, “Kefauver’s ambitious. He wants to be the next president.”

“So you think this gangbuster stuff is just publicity-seeking.”

Rocco said, “Goddamn right.”

“Whatever the case, the more stable minds around Kefauver,” Charley said, “were either able to maneuver him, or talk reason to him. Anyway, even though he’s got staff poking around here, he postponed the Chicago hearings, yes, till after the election; he’s in Kansas City, now.”

“Truman must love that,” I said, thinking about the President’s own ties to convicted felon, Boss Tom Pendergast.

Charley was beaming at me; he hadn’t noticed I hadn’t touched my martini—I hate the things. “Now, Nate, I won’t insult you—I guess we know where you stand, if you get called to testify.”

I shrugged. “Nobody’s talked to me yet.”

“They’ll get around to you.”

I didn’t question how he knew this, I just said, “They’ll be wasting their time.”

Rocco sat forward and said, “You heard about this fifth amendment thing, ain’t you? Charley, tell him about this fifth amendment thing.”

Charley’s small mouth formed a smile large with condescension. “I believe our friend Mr. Heller knows his constitutional rights, Rock.”

Rocco said to me, “Even if they get us on contempt, for not answerin’? A few months and you’re on the street again.”

“Rocky,” Charley said, “Nate can decide for himself how to handle this unpleasantness.”

So that’s what this was about: getting my assurance that the Outfit had nothing to worry from me, if I testified.

Or so I thought, till Charley went on to say: “What we really want to talk to you about is this guy Drury, who works for you.”

“He doesn’t work for me anymore.”

“You let him go? Fired him?”

“That’s right.”

“When?”

“Recently.”

Charley thought about that, then sighed and said, “I understand you’re friends—you were on the department, together. He saved your life. That has to carry weight.”

“Bill is still my friend. But he’s his own man.”

“You need to talk to him. He’s making trouble. Settle him down.”

I gestured with an open hand. “I don’t carry
that
kind of weight with him. Nobody does.”

Charley’s eyes narrowed under the dark slashes of brow. “You could offer him his job back—at an increased salary, if he concentrates on his work for you. I could arrange to pay you the difference, every month.”

“That’s generous, Charley. But I don’t understand—if you’re not really worried about the Kefauver Committee—”

“I told you: it’s the bad publicity. This lunatic Drury, he’ll testify, he’ll bring up all kinds of ancient history, he’ll spin his yarns, and we’ll look like a bunch of gangsters.”

Can you imagine that?

“He’s a hard-headed Irishman,” I said. “Proud as hell and twice as stubborn—you can’t buy him, and you can’t scare him. And if you…do anything else, you’ll really have bad publicity.”

Rocco glared at me. And this time I didn’t feel like kidding him.

Charley looked unhappy, too, as he got up and poured himself another martini. Still over at the bar, he said, “What you’re implying is out of line, Nate. That’s the old school. This is not 1929.”

Joey said to Charley, as he was sitting back down, “Ask him about Frank.”

Charley sipped his fresh martini and said, “You ask him. Frank’s your friend.”

Joey swallowed and sat forward. “Nate, you must’ve seen Frank out in Hollywood.”

“Just the other night, actually. Why?”

Joey’s handsome face contorted as he said to me, “I can ask him, but what’s he gonna say? I mean, to me? Being who I am. What do
you
think?”

I said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

Joey held out open palms. “Where does Frank stand?”

“Oh. Well—he’s scared right now. The feds are squeezing him—you want bad publicity, try being a show business guy labeled a Red.”

“Never mind that,” Charley said. “What’s your opinion of Sinatra’s integrity?”

“I can’t see him selling you guys out,” I said.

Rocco asked, “Too scared?”

“No. He likes you guys. Respects you. You know how some people feel about movie stars? That’s how he feels about you.”

Charley thought about that, nodded, set his martini glass on the coffee table. “Appreciate your frankness, Nate. Your insights.” He checked his watch, then patted my shoulder. “Gotta chase you out, now—before my next appointment.”

When Charley stood, so did I, and his brothers. I shook hands with Charley and Rocco, and Joey walked me to the elevator.

“Thanks for standing up for Frank,” Joey said, in the entryway. “I’ll get you a ringside table, opening night.”